Claus likes to stir in everything that is rotten, also in Creil

If it was ever, the Kreilerwoud was a swamp forest surrounded by mysteries between West and Midden-Friesland, named after the Frisian word for willow tents. Later it was washed away by the Zuiderzee and now it is reasons in the polder town of Creil, just above Urk. No willow tens, but wants to grow it at the rural minib library of Creil. Impact the bookcase and also opened the attack on the beautiful mosaic bench next to it. Small flies sit on the glass, as if they are a pendious doubt about what they will take now. How God disappeared from Jorwerd? The big desire?

Or Impertinentthe last novel (1998) by Hugo Claus, the net-not-nobel prize winner who died in 2008 at the age of 78; He did not want to experience the deterioration with which Alzheimer’s threatened him until the end. In that science, a sentence stands out in the beginning, in which an ex-commissioner lists his ailments: « Just wait until you have reached my years. Rheumatism. Forgetfulness. I was so proud of my memory. Every detail of every file. »

The file that before uses in Impertinent Is that Van Noël, a man who, as a child in a tandem accident – guilt from his mother, he says – fell on his head and has had trouble coming along since then. He works in the warehouse of an office bookstore, where he is called brother. For the Claus readers: He is the brother of René Catrijsse, the deserter out Rumors (1996).

« It was a thirteen -year -old girl on the coast and two girls of fourteen in the Haspengouw region missing. September. » So we are in the middle of the deep crisis in which Belgium ended up with the Dutroux affair. Really something for Claus, the man who stirred with lust in everything there was rotten. (« If Belgium did not already exist, Hugo Claus would have invented it, » wrote Hans Cheap in his review.)

The disappeared girls come from the background to the foreground when brother gets photos that indicate that one of his colleagues has something to do with the loss. What we read is the interrogation of brother by the former commissioner, which gives the impression that something went wrong in the settlement of that issue, despite the atmosphere of good-natured inability that dominates the introduction to brother.

The speed and ingenuity with which Claus highlights things are amazing. Brother’s response to the disappearance of the girls reflects the trauma of an entire country. This includes the mistake that the crime of the other is very close and the gradual view that these horrible crimes gradually have arisen from nowhere, but that there must be a plan behind it. For example, a good man is touched by conspiracy thinking and you can imagine that it will somehow go wrong with brother.

That is – of course – counted outside of Claus who has deported numerous wandering traces in the course of the story and who makes evil in different places and grow, with a voltage structure that makes you Impertinent Read in a curse and a sigh (a knife stab and a breath). It is a nice final chord, also, from a writer who once again, with one hand in the pocket, shows how to handle that, write a novel – even when the time you are on the heels.

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