CHAPEL ROAD

A pioneering work of metafiction by a little-known but masterful Belgian writer.

Begun in German-occupied Belgium in 1943, this multilayered story by Boon (1912–1979) was first published 10 years later—but in any event, surely before its time. It’s set in a backwater town in a backwater part of Flanders, not especially far from Brussels but far enough away for the capital to be a kind of dreamland, a place to which only an adventurous few villagers escape. One is ondine (Boon’s proper nouns are lowercased), introduced at the start of the novel, whose narrator promises that it will concern not just that blond-ringleted 19th-century social climber but also her wayward brother valeer, “with his monstrous head wobbling through life this way and that,” who manages to infuriate ondine for a cardinal sin: “in his tiredness and shabbiness he looked happy.” Ondine is the Candide of the tale, if Voltaire were Céline and ondine lived in the worst of all possible worlds: She steals from the chapel’s offertory box, affects saintliness (“She couldn’t bear it that anyone was holier than she”), despises her working-class but aspirational father and his illiterate fellow millworkers, and tries not to realize that “the root of her wretchedness…was her own nature.” Atop and throughout all this, Boon layers a satirical history of European politics and its “nazi, marxist and encyclicalist regimes,” weaves in a lively retelling of the medieval tale of the randy and larcenous reynard the fox, and plays with the conceit that this is a novel within a novel that’s certainly no holiday in Bruges to read: “who the devil almighty can make sense of this book? Nobody, except me, boon, and maybe I’m only pretending to myself that I can.” And that’s just so.

A perplexing but intriguing addition to the library of proto-postmodernism.