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A review by jacob_wren
Chapel Road by Louis Paul Boon
5.0
.
The Darkness Of Our Own Frightened Hearts, Reading Chapel Road in Brussels: http://radicalcut.blogspot.de/2013/06/the-darkness-of-our-own-frightened.html
Plus, Louis Paul Boon writes:
From your open attic window you can see no-man’s wood being painted red by the sinking sun, and you hear msieu colson of the ministry’s melancholy sheep bleating one last time before it disappears behind the stable door: and then you push your papers aside and go downstairs, just when the music master opens the door and together with his pretty wife lucette lets a little of that late red sunshine enter. He shakes his head in his music master’s way, and you hear him say:
I suppose you’ve been poring over your papers up there in your attic, writing about the world-of-today; well, I’ve misunderstood so many books already and I know that all there is to say has already been said; I’m not even talking now of ecclesiastes, of the faust-writers or the mad actor of hamlet… no, please don’t interrupt me, let me go on; do you really think that up in that attic of yours you’re going to gather greater wisdom than lao tse, or can you be more surrealist-erotic-simple-minded than the songs of maldoror? Will you sound human depths and heights more deeply and more highly than the demons in the brothers Karamazov, will you chase time outside time and space more ferociously than proust, or will you whip life within time and space more grimly that in the voyage au bout de la nuit? Will you be any better in depicting modern derailed man-in-a-crooked-society in his true condition as living and thinking animal than lady chatterley’s love? Can you play with words more soberly than Lenin, more naturalistically than zola, more symbolically than the bible? Can you possibly be more solemn and more infallible than the pope in rome, more fabulously immoral than the Arabian nights, more heavenly than the imitation of christ, more subtle and more cunning that the reynard of william-who-created-madoc; more tragic-rustic than nivardus’ isengrinus? And can you be more modernly, mangily unbelieving than tropic of Capricorn? or more romantically miserable than the sprawl of suburbia?
And when you hear the music master fall silent and see him press his lips together, you reply: maybe it is impossible to say anything new and better, but the dust of time falls on everything that has been written and so I think it’s right if every ten years someone else draws a line through all those old things and describes the world-of-today in different words.
The Darkness Of Our Own Frightened Hearts, Reading Chapel Road in Brussels: http://radicalcut.blogspot.de/2013/06/the-darkness-of-our-own-frightened.html
Plus, Louis Paul Boon writes:
From your open attic window you can see no-man’s wood being painted red by the sinking sun, and you hear msieu colson of the ministry’s melancholy sheep bleating one last time before it disappears behind the stable door: and then you push your papers aside and go downstairs, just when the music master opens the door and together with his pretty wife lucette lets a little of that late red sunshine enter. He shakes his head in his music master’s way, and you hear him say:
I suppose you’ve been poring over your papers up there in your attic, writing about the world-of-today; well, I’ve misunderstood so many books already and I know that all there is to say has already been said; I’m not even talking now of ecclesiastes, of the faust-writers or the mad actor of hamlet… no, please don’t interrupt me, let me go on; do you really think that up in that attic of yours you’re going to gather greater wisdom than lao tse, or can you be more surrealist-erotic-simple-minded than the songs of maldoror? Will you sound human depths and heights more deeply and more highly than the demons in the brothers Karamazov, will you chase time outside time and space more ferociously than proust, or will you whip life within time and space more grimly that in the voyage au bout de la nuit? Will you be any better in depicting modern derailed man-in-a-crooked-society in his true condition as living and thinking animal than lady chatterley’s love? Can you play with words more soberly than Lenin, more naturalistically than zola, more symbolically than the bible? Can you possibly be more solemn and more infallible than the pope in rome, more fabulously immoral than the Arabian nights, more heavenly than the imitation of christ, more subtle and more cunning that the reynard of william-who-created-madoc; more tragic-rustic than nivardus’ isengrinus? And can you be more modernly, mangily unbelieving than tropic of Capricorn? or more romantically miserable than the sprawl of suburbia?
And when you hear the music master fall silent and see him press his lips together, you reply: maybe it is impossible to say anything new and better, but the dust of time falls on everything that has been written and so I think it’s right if every ten years someone else draws a line through all those old things and describes the world-of-today in different words.