War and Turpentine

Just when I’d decided I couldn’t face another World War I story for quite some time, this title and lovely impressionistic cover caught my eye and also the fact it is a translation. I thought perhaps here is a point of view that differs from so many WW1 novels written by English authors who tend to have similar voices because of their educations or backgrounds.
 
Written by Flemish poet and novelist Stefan Hertmans, with translation by David McKay, this is based on some notebooks written by Hertmans’ grandfather, Urbain Martien, shortly before he died in 1981. (This New York Times review gives the best summary.)
 
While it has passages of poetic beauty and tenderness deflecting off others packed with fiendish and grotesque horror, I do wonder how faithful this is to the notebooks themselves; how much is romanticised and intellectualised, how much is enhanced with splattered guts for those readers who prefer over-the-top-with-the-flag-boys fiction to introspection, art and philosophy? (If you aren’t already a vegetarian the descriptions of Urbain visiting a gelatine factory are enough to turn you into one.)
 
Urbain found his release from war, grief and disappointment in love through painting copies of masterpieces and portraiture, so somehow the excessive details of his war service don’t quite fit. It is a well-known truth that the majority of those who survived the trenches of World War I were silent or reserved about their actions and, even if they did share what they had been through, they would resort to macabre humour or allusion rather than describing squelching brains of comrades left on one’s boots. Perhaps rather than polishing and expanding the raw words of Urbain, there may have been greater honesty if the memoir had been lightly edited and left as written.
 
All this aside, I acknowledge that this is a magnificent piece of writing (evidence of a superb translation too), and it works best when the author’s own voice comes through as he wanders through the modern landscape trying to place it within the context of his grandfather’s past, such as in this passage where he is trying to visualise an ethereal nude girl who rose out of a lake and captured Urbain’s soul:

“ … but it can’t be done: the ring road, the buildings, the industrial sites, the fences, the streets, the railway, everything runs straight through it, as if an old songline had been ruptured by the brute force and mindlessness with which modern technology has flattened memories everywhere.”
 
And in the closing pages …
 
“… paradox was the constant in his life, as he was tossed back and forth between the soldier he had to be and the artist he’d wished to become. War and turpentine. The tranquillity of his final years made it possible for him to slowly overcome his traumas.”
 
No matter how good your research and imagination are, if you weren’t there you can’t ever really know what it was like and first-hand accounts remain the best (as in All Quiet on the Western Front, Testament of Youth, A Farewell to Arms, etc.). There are echoes here of that reality but like some of the old masters that Urbain copied they are hidden under the varnish.

Four stars.

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