The Sorrow of Belgium Book

This is one of those in the 1001 Books You Must Read Before You Die list and originally written in Dutch. It is considered one of the masterpieces of Dutch literature.

I plodded through this with zero knowledge about Belgium and its history and I can honestly say I got lost. When I finished it I had one question in my mind: what the hell was this all about? Maybe this would have been the experience of someone from Belgium, with zero knowledge about the Philippines, reading Jose Rizal’s Noli Me Tangere translated into Dutch.

The setting is, of course, Belgium. During the Nazi occupation. Central to the story was Louis who was a mischievous adolescent at the start of the novel (an aunt, who caught him stealing money from her, called him the Sorrow of Belgium). A sort of introduction was written by its translator Arnold J. Pomerans where I got a forewarning about the novel’s “multilayered complexity” and I am sure this is true, it was indeed multilayered and complex that I got lost in the maze. I was supposed to enjoy the dialogues (indeed there are mostly dialogues here) but I found them insipid (with my humble apology to the author, the translator and the whole of Belgium!).

Maybe this was one instance where too much was lost in the translation?