Displacements
If there is one line that’s been reverberating in Stefan Hertmans’ mind for years, it’s a well-known quote from Victor Klemperer, written with a steady hand in his famous journals during the Nazi period, amid terror and uncertainty: ‘The contemporary witness knows nothing.’
Each chapter appears to us as a gleaming pearl in these dark times.De Volkskrant
There is one thing that we do know: this is a time of transition to something we’re only just beginning to understand. We are all eyewitnesses, although we’re only partially aware of what it is we’re witnessing, namely our current reality and the shifts we feel every day without knowing exactly what they will amount to.
In these ruminations, as erudite as they are sensitive, Stefan Hertmans undertakes the challenge of trying to capture something of this zeitgeist, of pinning down the things that tend to elude our grasp in the chaos of day-to-day life.
Hertmans is on the cutting edge of his own era.Vrij Nederland
A masterpiece.De Limburger