Flanders Literature helps publishers and festival organisers find that one particular title or author that is the perfect fit for their list or audience. So take a good look around, we present a selection of the finest literature from Flanders. If you like what you see, please get in touch with us for further information.
A work of lasting value for any conscious human being
Algemeen Dagblad
Basile Jonas, a sensitive and vulnerable teacher, is crushed and devoured by the totalitarian and materialistic society he lives in. Everything in this society is geared towards Utility and Profit, leaving no space for softer values such as poetry, music and friendship.
The Heylen family hold an annual memorial for their dead mother in the vicarage of a Flemish village. This year, however, the solemn day sees friction and misunderstandings bubble to the surface, which makes for a chaotic gathering. In a haze of sexuality and violence, the hour of truth draws closer.
‘Wonder’ is without any doubt one of the landmarks of twentieth-century Dutch literature. The baroque plot is intertwined with strong psychological portraits, scenes from Flemish military history and lurid images of desire.
With Jos Vandeloo we have gained one more great and modern writer
Louis Paul Boon
Three workers in a nuclear power station are irradiated during an accident. After examination, they are placed in a separate wing of the hospital, isolated from the rest of society and doomed to die within a week. When, after a few days, one of them dies, the other two men desperately undertake an escape attempt from this terrible isolation.
Journalist Freek Groenevelt’s life is thoroughly shaken up by a series of surprising events that seem to all revolve around an individual called Joachim Stiller. The novel is a textbook example of the magic realist style in which reality is interwoven with surreal elements: nothing is exactly as it seems.
In ‘Minuet’, a man works eight hours a day in the deep-freeze basement of a factory. In that polar world he is accompanied only by his own fears and thoughts, and for hours on end he has conversations with himself. The neurotic protagonist poses critical questions about religion, monarchy and the State.
One of the few truly magnificent novels in Dutch language-literature. A masterpiece.
De Volkskrant
This novel tells the story of Ondine, who was born in a poverty-stricken house in Chapel Road at the turn of the twentieth century. The Times Literary Supplement wrote: 'Since its original appearance in 1953, this novel by the candidate for the Nobel Prize has been controversial as only works in advance of their time can be; and even now that experimental writing is commonplace, it has lost none of its freshness and vitality.'
His is some of the most exquisite work to be found in Dutch.
Het Vaderland
‘Winter in Antwerp’ is the singular follow-up to Gilliams’ ‘Elias or the Struggle with the Nightingales’. Elias now having lost his mother and spent months in hospital, is walking to his elderly father’s house. In brief, associative, yet carefully composed chapters, the narrator examines his past, his obsessions and his fears.
‘Lament for Agnes’ is essentially an autobiographical novel. The character of Agnes is in many respects that of Gijsen’s own fiancé who died of TB, while the narrator has much in common with the authors as a young man. ‘Lament for Agnes’ is a novel that is once deeply personal and a fully independent work of art.
After a mysterious journey in a train populated with sleeping passengers, three train travellers find themselves in a strange, shadowy land, a timeless transition area, to which each responds in his own way.
'The Duck Hunt' is the story of a Flemish farming family during World War II. The centre of the family is the widow Metsiers, who is called ‘the Mother’. Years ago, she murdered her husband, together with her lover Mon Verkindere, with whom she now lives on the farmstead. She has two children: Ana and Bennie. Bennie and his half-sister are driven ever closer together, until a love grows between them for which Bennie eventually has to pay the price.
A mix of acutely observed human passions and surrealist contradictions
Dietsche Warande en Belfort
Teacher Govert Miereveld becomes enchanted by his pupil Fran. Unable to express his love, he leaves the school and changes both his job and hometown. Ten years later he attends an autopsy, which affects him a great deal. Later that day, he also runs into Fran in the hotel where he is staying. That night, he visits her in her hotel room, where a drama unfolds.
This splendid, painful, sparkling book is worth reading and rereading
De Standaard
‘My Little War’ is based on Boon's own war experiences during World War II. It is a collection of thirty loosely interrelated chapters, each containing a story that can be read independently. ‘My Little War’ is to Flemish literature what ‘Voyage au bout de la nuit’ by Louis-Ferdinand Céline is to French literature: a slap in the face to bourgeois literature, a radical experiment that thoroughly shook up the traditional novel.
A finely tempered piece, with an intuitive sympathy for strange modes of feeling
The Times
‘Will-O’-The-Wisp’, the last of Elsschot's novellas, tells the story of the nocturnal search by the rather washed-up Frans Laarmans and three Afghan sailors for the mysterious Maria van Dam. The simple plot of a fruitless search in an urban setting contains undertones of a wider parable of the quest, thus making a concentrated summary of the themes that run through all Elsschot’s novels.
Elsschot possesses the rare knack of making a reader laugh, squirm and sob, all at the same time
The New York Times
The novellas ‘Soft Soap’ (1924) and ‘The Leg’ (1938) are two highlights from Elsschot’s fiction, linked by a common narrative and featuring the recurring tragicomic Keatonesque character of Frans Laarmans who also appears in Will-o’-the-Wisp (1946).
In a series of fascinating scenes, Gilliams evokes the vulnerable position of a boy growing up amongst older people in a world shaped by nostalgia and the fear of life. Elias perceives that world ‘in the lucidity of a dream’. The precision of observation and narrative evocation is what makes ‘Elias’ such a masterpiece.
One can speak of Elsschot’s oeuvre as great European literature
Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
Since its publication in English, ‘Cheese’ has conquered the world with translations in more than 30 languages. The novella deals with an episode in the life of Frans Laarmans, a clerk who is suddenly made chief representative of a Dutch cheese company. ‘Cheese’ is a satire of the business world and the perfect vehicle for Elsschot’s dry humorous style. In a brilliant evocation of the thirties, it depicts a world full of smart operators and failed businessmen.
An ‘ode to life’ written after a moral and physical crisis, ‘Pallieter’ was warmly received as an antidote to the misery of World War I in occupied Belgium. ‘Pallieter’ is a portrait of Flemish rural life in which there is never a cheerless moment.
