My Little War

by Louis Paul Boon, Paul Vincent (Translator)

Overview

Following in the footsteps of Celine and Joyce, and anticipating the gritty worldview of Burroughs and Bukowski . . .

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781564785589
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	12/29/2009
Series:	Belgian Literature Series
Pages:	125
Product dimensions:	5.62(w) x 8.04(h) x 0.39(d)
Age Range:	18 Years

About the Author

Louis Paul Boon's (1912-1979) oeuvre spans several genres, including historical epics, newspaper columns, and scabrous novels such as Chapel Road and Summer in Termuren.

Paul Vincent is an award-winning translator of Dutch literature whose translation of Hendrik Marsman's Herinnering aan Holland earned the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize.

What People are Saying About This

R. F. Lissens

His blitz technique produces its strangest effects in this little journal from the war and the post-war period, which booms crazily, as if Boon's typewriter had been rattling away like a machine-gun.

Editorial Reviews

This slender volume, originally published in 1947 but only now available in English for the first time, is an anti-epic. Boon is less interested in his own misfortunes than in those of the people he encounters along his way.

Jim Ruland - Los Angeles Times

His blitz technique produces its strangest effects in this little journal from the war and the post-war period, which booms crazily, as if Boon’s typewriter had been rattling away like a machine-gun.

R. F. Lissens

[B]y far the best thing produced by post-war Belgian literature.

Marnix Gijsen - De Volkskrant

In this peculiar WWII novel, first published in 1947, the Flemish author gives his own first name, Louis, to the narrator, but also insists that the “I” of his first-person narration is also “you,” the reader. As someone whose generation “blossomed between the two wars,” Louis offers a heavy dose of overtly symbolic disillusionment and self-conscious sentimentality while writing very little about the war itself. Mostly, he’s at home contemplating the people in his neighborhood. An “anarchist, nihilist, and a dirty old man,” Louis can’t quite identify anything connected with the war, and this ambiguity is of course meant to question the nature of war itself. Instead, the reader gets lost in a strange, vague world where multiple characters are referred to as “What’s-his-name” and musings on misery are italicized or printed in capital letters. This cursory treatment of reality allows Boon more time to talk about himself, the decline of humanity (best illustrated by loose women), and the feigned hypersensitivity that accompanies all great nihilist authors, but that Boon can’t quite get right. (Jan.)

Publishers Weekly

This uncultured and unpolished prose is not edifying literature. It is the lewd stuttering and gibberish of those cast adrift from God's anchor, of a wreck among wrecks, in which the breath of the artist is only distantly present.
— Het Handelsblad

A.K. Rottiers

[B]y far the best thing produced by post-war Belgian literature.
— De Volkskrant

Marnix Gijsen