Tag: belgium

I WHO HAVE NEVER KNOWN MEN by Jacqueline Harpman

This book begins with a girl trapped in a cage with 39 women. The woman are not allowed to express feelings or to touch each other. It is unclear why they are there. They have vague memories of some kind of calamity (fire, screaming, running) but seem to have been drugged, as they cannot remember much of their lives before. It’s all very strange – they don’t even seem to be on a standard cycle – for example, food comes at odd hours for no reason, and the lights never change. Then one day SPOLIER ALERT an alarm goes off just as they are about to be fed, so the guards run away with the keys in the door, and so they are able to escape.

They emerge into an empty plain, and go searching. They SPOILER ALERT find multiple other bunkers, all with cages with 40 people in them, always gender segregated, always dead. AND GUYS THAT’S IT. They never learn any more about why they are there and what it all means. The other women all die as they are much older than the child; and then she spends many years alone.

It is just wild: imagine living your whole life not knowing why things are the way they are. Why are you there? Where even are you? What does it all mean? When she knows she is dying, she sets herself up sitting bold and unafraid. I was like, wow, imagine dealing with a life that is such a mystery. Then I thought, I guess I know someone else who has to do that, which is all of us.

The Introduction seemed to think this book was a lot about gender, but I did not get that at all. For me it was more about meaninglessness, which is pretty gender neutral. It was a very short book, but I find I keep thinking about it. It’s somehow flicked a switch in how I think about my own life, and the courage it takes to live it.

WAR AND TURPENTINE by Stefan Hertmans

Here a man uses his grandfather’s actual diaries to recreate life in the early twentieth century.  It starts off interesting – for example, we learn how many very specific scents are lost to us.  Here he is on his great-grandmother:

Her black apron – he called it a pinafore – smelled like the offal of young rabbits

Horrifyingly specific.  Then we get into flashforwards, where we follow the author around modern day and very dull city of Ghent.  Things go rapidly downhill. It is not easy to write about the book you are writing.  Emmanual Carrere manages it, but few others can, and certainly not this writer.  Enjoy:

. . . I would scarely recognize the area.  Wild geese, a few sluggish swans in the polluted riverside mud, nervous moorhens in the black, oil-soaked mire.  Damaged nature, memory.  Pom-pom-pom, pom-pom-pom.  Humming, I walk out of the old cemetery.  But in the twilight, as I revel in the adagio strains of Edvard Grieg’s ‘Ase’s Death,’ that superlative mourning music for a dead mother, I see, in my mind’s eye, the old phantoms far above me, flickering titanically on the walls of a cave, blown up into eerie shapes by the light of a fire beyond my ken.

This is where I stopped.