THE REMEMBERED SOLDIER

A Dutch novel about loss, identity, and the lasting effects of war.

In 1922 in Flanders, four years after the end of the Great War, many wives still desperately seek their missing husbands. Noon Merckem has been kept in an asylum for four years, his name assigned to him by the doctors. Not physically injured, he has shell shock and has completely lost his memory. Several women try to claim him, but they cannot properly identify him. But Julienne Coppens correctly says he has a certain scar from an old accident, and against medical advice he is released into her care. She tells him his real name is Amand Stephaan Coppens, he’s the father of their two children, proprietor of a photography shop with his name in the window, and she has been waiting for him for eight years. Already her family is living on the margins: She breaks a rabbit’s neck in her backyard and cooks it up with prunes for supper, and she struggles to pay the rent. Quite an adjustment lies ahead: “She has him back and yet she doesn’t,” because he doesn’t remember her. At first, they are not physical, but eventually they enjoy the warmth of each other’s bodies in bed. “And weeks of outrageous happiness follow,” but it hardly lasts. She takes charge of his life and his well-being. And he “feels nothing, as if she’s gutted and skinned him and left nothing but an empty carcass.” More dramatically, he suffers tumultuous nightmares and once awakens in shock to realize he is nearly strangling her. He dreams of the battlefield, and tells her he vaguely remembers red flares, machine-gun fire, exploding shells, and being buried alive under a pile of dead bodies. But he does not trust these memories, and he begins to wonder if he can trust Julienne. This is a story about healing a soldier’s mind after surviving years of carnage, and it is about restoring mutual trust and love after so much has happened. Stylistic quirks may be problematic or not, according to readers’ tastes. It is almost 600 pages of run-on sentences with many including up to 100 words and 10 comma-separated clauses. And the author begins most paragraphs with “And.” And she buries all dialogue in the narrative.

An absorbing tale for the patient reader.