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Four taboo-tackling plays from the foremost writer of Dutch language theatre, poetry and prose.
Beautifully translated from the Dutch by David Colmer, the IMPAC Award-winning translator of Gerbrand Bakker’s The Twin, Hugo Claus’s poems are remarkable for their dexterity, intensity of feeling, and acute intelligence. From the richly associative and referential “Oostakker Poems” to the emotional and erotic outpouring of the “mad dog stanzas” in “Morning, You,” from his interpretations of Shakespeare’s sonnets to a modern adaptation of a Sanskrit masterpiece, this volume reveals the breadth and depth of Claus’s stunning output. Perhaps Belgium’s leading figure of postwar Dutch literature, Claus has long been associated with the avant-garde: these poems challenge conventional bourgeois mores, religious bigotry, and authoritarianism with visceral passion.
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Hugo Claus, generally recognized as the greatest living writer in the Dutch language, became famous in the theater for several early works of particular force and daring. This volume includes three of those remarkable early plays: Bride in the Morning, Sugar, and The Sacrament. All three plays boast unforgettable characters trapped in a world of oppressive social mores. The central figures are all subject to sexual and creative impulses towards objects of forbidden love that bring disapproval and censure crashing in on them, subsequently bringing about their own ruin.
A classic novel in the tradition of The Tin Drum, The Sorrow of Belgium is a searing, scathingly funny portrait of a wartime Belgium and one boy's coming of age -- emotionally, sexually, and politically. In 1939, Louis Seynaeve, a ten-year-old Flemish student, is chiefly occupled with schoolboy adventures and lurid adolescent fantasies. Then the Nazis invade Belgium, and he grows up fast. Bewildered by his family -- a stuffy father who actually welcomes the occupation and a flirtatious mother who works for (and plays with) the Germans -- he is seemingly at the center of so much he can't understand. Gradually, as he confronts the horrors of the war and its aftermath, the eccentric and often petty behavior of his colorful relatives and neighbors, and his own inner turmoil, he achieves a degree of maturity -- at the cost of deep disillusion. Epic in scope, by turns hilarious and elegiac, The Sorrow of Belgium is the masterwork by one of the world's greatest contemporary authors. Book jacket.
A gripping tale of desire, temptation, searching, revelation, and the impossibility of escaping the past.
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In 1939, Louis Seynaeve, a ten-year-old Flemish student, is chiefly occupied with schoolboy adventures and lurid adolescent fantasies. Then the Nazis invade Belgium, and he grows up fast. Bewildered by his family--a stuffy father who welcomes the occupation and a flirtatious mother who works for (and plays with) the Germans--he is seemingly at the center of so much he can't understand. Gradually, as he confronts the horrors of the war and its aftermath, the eccentric and often petty behavior of his colorful relatives and neighbors, and his own inner turmoil, he achieves a degree of maturity--at the cost of deep disillusion. Epic in scope, by turns hilarious and elegiac, The Sorrow of Belgium is the masterwork by one of the world's greatest contemporary authors.
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The first English-language collection of poems by this major Flemish writer, Greetings contains work from more than six decades of Hugo Claus's career. Uncompromising and irreverent, Claus writes about postwar politics and society, about race and class, love and sex, art and literature. This volume is sure to appeal to anyone interested in the avant-garde of the last half-century-and to anyone interested in poetry that continues to be provocative, pertinent, and compelling. Year of atrocities, year of cathode-ray tube and stock market report, Year of milk and honey if you're asleep, Year that sticks in your stomach if you're awake, Sweet year, good year for sleepwalkers . . . Year that freezes the smile. It was in that year I went to live in a village with books, a wife and a child who grows while I talk about the tigers in the East. - F R O M " 1 9 6 5 "