Stefan Hertmans

#ReadAroundTheWorld. #Belgium

This book is a poetic novelisation by Flemish Belgian author Stefan Hertmans, of the life of his grandfather, Urbain Martien, who lived from 1891 to 1981. The book has been translated from Dutch, and is based on two notebooks Stefan’s grandfather gave him, containing Urbain’s written recollections of his life especially the time serving in WWI.

Urbain grew up in Ghent at the end of the 19th Century in a poor family, his father working as a church mural painter. Urbain worked as an ironworker, his body scarred by the molten sparks, and painted passionately in his spare time, reproducing works of the masters.

The book shifts between a third person account narrated by Stefan, including his own recollections of his grandfather, then the middle section of the book is a first person account supposedly from Urbain’s diary accounts of the war. The final part shifts back to a third person account of his post-war life, romance, tragic losses, family life and struggles. It is hard to know how much of the account is Urbain’s and how much has been fictionalised, but the writing is beautiful and descriptive. I found the war section most engrossing. It describes the racism of the French officers towards the Flemish soldiers, the muddy horrific life in the trenches, and Urbain’s courage in volunteering for missions no-one else wanted.

The third person sections felt rather jumpy and more awkward. I’m not fond of books with an intrusive narrator, it tends to take me out of the story itself. Nevertheless this was a good read, I liked Urbain as a character, and I enjoyed the contrast between beautiful descriptions of artworks and the ugliness of the war.… (more)

This is a crushingly sad story based on the true-life of Vigdis Adelaïs, the well-todo Christian daughter of a Rouen burgher who made the mistake of falling in love with a rabbinic student in XIth century Normandy.

It is also the story of the terror a Pope unleashed in medieval France with a holy war to recover the seat of Christianity, Jerusalem.

And for the talented Flemish author, Stefan Hertmans, it is also the story of uncovering the extraordinary scholarship of medieval Judaism of the huge cache of documents of the Cairo Genizah from which the woman’s story came to light.

The origins and recovery of more than 300,000 texts, fragments, and scrolls is a tale itself worthy of Argentinian master storyteller, Jorge Luis Borges.

Hertmans’ skill interweaving the stories is not to be missed, nor his lush reconstructions of Medieval France and Cairo, where his own wanderings following the woman’s epic quest to recover her children took him.

In Jewish law, no document containing the Lord’s name YAH-WEH could be destroyed, so officials of an old Egyptian synagogue threw their documents into a room called a genizah from which they were to be retrieved by God himself. And they did this for centuries.

Until a couple of amateur archaeologists (twin adult women it so happens) brought the recovery of the documents to the attention of Hebrew scholars in the late 19th century.

The story leads to an extraordinary moment when the author visits Cambridge University and holds in his hand the original letter of protection penned by the chief rabbi of Narbonne for his daughter-in-law that she carried across the land and seas in her ultimately doomed quest to recover her children stolen by Norman Crusaders during a pogrom.

Hertmans reimagines her travels. Stunningly.

The Genizah can be read as a forerunner of our own Internet where billions of documents, photos, and videos may be recovered centuries from now to reconstruct our own time.

If you enjoy this book you will also enjoy Hertmans’ earlier work War and Turpentine, his backhanded homage to Tolstoy.… (more)

Stefan Hertmans' War and Turpentine is a painful if beautiful work of war guilt, as he himself explains late in the book. It mixes together real or imagined diary entries of his grandfather with personal reflection on the past, WWI, and his immediate ancestors.

Both his grandfather and his father before him were painters, the older father being a restorer of church paintings and frescoes in Belgium and England.

The son, Hertmans' grandfather, was more of a hobbiest artist after an excruciating if heroic time as a foot soldier in WWI. The first person storytelling of the trenches, of life as a squad commander, and the experience of being wounded in the conflict are as affecting as any I've read. It ranks up there with some of my favourites on WWI, including Birdsong and Three Day Road.

But the story is as much about love and longing for beauty as war and this is where it departs from much of the fiction I read these days.

The fathers in this this tale succumb to the love passion as deeply as the experience in war. If anything, I wonder if the story isn't more about the author missing that connection with passion and pain in the way his forebears experienced it. The smells and the terror of war. The agony of the flu carrying off the most beautiful woman before that love is consummated. And the loss of the husband so beautiful and pure in his art that a woman can't even look at other men (even the man she subsequently married) 30 years after consumption took him to the grave.

There is something else of of nationalism in the book where the young Flemish soldier is demeaned by his French-speaking officers. "Here is my blood, where is my freedom" engraved in a war monument.

Pretty much what people feel today.… (more)