Louis Paul Boon's (1912-1979) oeuvre spans several genres, including historical epics, newspaper columns, and scabrous novels such as Chapel Road and Summer in Termuren. Paul Vincent is an award-winning translator of Dutch literature whose translation of Hendrik Marsman's Herinnering aan Holland earned the David Reid Poetry Translation Prize.
This slender volume, originally published in 1947 but only now available in English for the first time, is an anti-epic. Boon is less interested in his own misfortunes than in those of the people he encounters along his way.--Jim Ruland