Bøger af Louis Paul Boon

"En eksperimentalroman om snart sagt alt ... Dette er mesterligt"Jørgen Hermann Monrad, WeekendavisenDen fattige Ondine ved hvad hun vil med sit liv, men verden og i særdeleshed de velhavende, ældre mænd vil noget andet. Forfatterens venner blander sig undervejs med kommentarer og ‘gode’ råd til historiens fortsættelse – alle har en dagsorden de vil have inkluderet: en historisk, en politisk, en litterær. Kapelgade er en banebrydende, oprørende, socialt indigneret og legende roman.Louis Paul Boon (1912-1979) mestrede mange stilarter og genrer: skønlitteratur (romaner og erotiske noveller), litterære essay og journalistik om belgisk politik, og hans absolutte mesterværk er den omfangsrige roman Kapelgade (1953), en modernistisk genreudfordring, der benytter sig af socialrealisme, selvbiografi (bl.a. diskuteres romanens komposition af forfatterens venner i romanen, mens historien udvikler sig) og gendigtning af en middelalderroman.I Flandern fortælles det, at Boon er det tætteste, man er kommet på en nobelpristager, idet han ulykkeligvis døde dagen inden et hemmeligt møde på den svenske ambassade – hvortil han efter sigende var indbudt for at blive orienteret om den kommende pris.

According to the author, Chapel Road is the book about the childhood of Ondine [. . .] about her brother Valeer-Traleer with his monstrous head wobbling through life this way and that. But the book is about a lot more than that. It is also the story of Louis Paul Boon, an author working on a novel entitled Chapel Road, surrounded by his colorful group of friends. His readers and companions include the painter Tippetotje, who habitually works a naked woman into her paintings, and Johan Janssens, the journalist and poet who is fired from the paper for refusing to agree with the Capitalists, the Socialists or the Ultra-Marxists. Beyond that, Chapel Road includes a retelling of the myth of Reynard the fox and Isengrinus the wolf, a tale that underscores the greed, stupidity, hypocrisy, pride and lust motivating the other characters of the book. Chapel Road is a pool, a sea, a chaos: it is the book of all that can be heard and seen in Chapel Road, from the year 1800-and-something until today.

Presents a story of Ondine and Oscarke, a young married couple adrift in a Belgian landscape that is darkening under the spread of industry and World War I. Ondine, who "came to serve god and live," finds that she must "serve the gentlemen" instead. Oscarke, an aspiring sculptor, finds himself unsuccessfully scouring Brussels for work.

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