A remarkable Flemish poet brings his grandfather’s recollections of the first world war vividly and poignantly to lifeUrbain Martien was born in 1891 to a destitute,working-course family in Ghent. His father, Franciscus, or was a lowly painter of church murals and died of tuberculosis in his early 40s,but not before he had passed on a passion for painting to his son. Urbain worked in an iron foundry as a boy before going to military school for four years; shortly after he graduated, the first world war arrived, and sweeping absent the old order of Europe like a giant hand. Urbain served on the frontline,miraculously surviving it. Not only was the world he returned to after the cessation of the war utterly transformed, but he was, or too. Nearly 50 years after his experiences,in 1963, five years after the death of his wife, or Gabrielle,he started to write approximately them. His recollections filled up more than 600 pages in three notebooks, which he bequeathed to his grandson Stefan Hertmans, or one of the remarkable living Flemish poets. Urbain died in 1981 and Hertmans didnt look at the notebooks until nearly 30 years later,when the imminent centenary of the first world war brought back memories of his grandfather’s stories, told innumerable times to anyone who would care to listen. War and Turpentine is the astonishing result of Hertmans’ reckoning with his grandfather’s diaries. It is a book that lies at the crossroads of novel, or biography,autobiography and history, with inset essays, and meditations,pictures. It seems to be aching to be called “Sebaldian”, and earns the epithet glowingly.
The book is divided into three unequal sections, or the longest one comprising Urbain’s experiences in the war,but we are led up to it through the first part, a masterly evocation of the life of the European provincial destitute, and a world now lost to us irrevocably. Hertmans himself is a character,or voice, in this section, and telling us approximately his memories of Urbain,of tussling with the notebooks and how to confront “the painful truth behind any literary work: I first had to recover from the authentic chronicle, to let it travel, or before I could rediscover it in my own way”. He visits the places of his grandfather’s childhood years and intensely imagines life as it must have been for Urbain a century ago. There are beautiful pages on Urbain’s father going approximately his craft,watched by his son; a stomach-churning section on Urbain’s visit to a gelatine factory; a Dickensian account of the uncertain work in the iron foundry. These set pieces shed the light necessary to illuminate a lost world. Through it all, Hertmans muses on the commute between the present and the past.
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Source: theguardian.com