The Sorrow of Belgium

“This complicated novel which operates at all sorts of different levels, but might be most simply described as a coming-of-age novel. It’s about a boy from provincial Flanders and all the ghosts that haunt him—ghosts from the World Wars, religion, and family disputes that have never been resolved. It’s crazy, picaresque writing. It perhaps doesn’t work all the way through, but nobody could read it and not feel that they had acquired a sense of what Belgium was really about. In that sense, he’s the sort of literary equivalent of the songs of Jacques Brel.” Read more...

The best books on Belgium

Martin Conway, Historian