Following in the footsteps of Céline and Joyce, and anticipating the gritty worldview of Burroughs and Bukowski . . . The great Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon began his life's work with this extraordinary novel, a story of World War II as seen through the unglamorous, uncourageous, unhistorical eyes of the man on the street. Frustrated with the dainty, straightforward, neatly chronological narratives that dominated fiction in his country, Boon started including overheard conversations, newspaper articles, manifestos, and other sights and noises of daily life in his work. Happily foul-mouthed and dirty-minded, eager to wade into the mud, Boon was resolutely unliterary while pursuing the most literary of goals: a new kind of writing, and a more honest way of looking at the world.
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From Publishers Weekly
In this peculiar WWII novel, first published in 1947, the Flemish author gives his own first name, Louis, to the narrator, but also insists that the I of his first-person narration is also you, the reader. As someone whose generation blossomed between the two wars, Louis offers a heavy dose of overtly symbolic disillusionment and self-conscious sentimentality while writing very little about the war itself. Mostly, he's at home contemplating the people in his neighborhood. An anarchist, nihilist, and a dirty old man, Louis can't quite identify anything connected with the war, and this ambiguity is of course meant to question the nature of war itself. Instead, the reader gets lost in a strange, vague world where multiple characters are referred to as What's-his-name and musings on misery are italicized or printed in capital letters. This cursory treatment of reality allows Boon more time to talk about himself, the decline of humanity (best illustrated by loose women), and the feigned hypersensitivity that accompanies all great nihilist authors, but that Boon can't quite get right. (Jan.)
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
One of the leading lights of postwar Flemish literature, Boon launched his variegated literary career with this wispy meditation on wartime calamities of the soul. Set in Belgium shortly after the Allies drove out the Nazis, this novel contains little plot to speak of; rather, it consists of a series of vignettes profiling a few dozen quasi-anonymous characters (many referred to as simply what’s-his-name), everyday people whose lives have been made absurd and uncomfortable, if not outright miserable, by the war. The lens at the center of these sketches is a writer, also named Louis, whose profound dismay at the futility and waste of war exists alongside an evident discomfort in trying to write about such things. The result is wryly cynical prose that enforces certain distances: between Louis and the characters he profiles, and between Louis and readers. Though strongly echoing another Louis (Louis-Ferdinand Céline), this novel also anticipates some of Boon’s later modernist experiments, particularly his epic Chapel Road (De Kapellekensbaan, 1972), which was also recently released in English translation. --Brendan Driscoll
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