The monsters here are very human - not so much the Nazis, but the Belgians whose carefully designed and enclosing social structures allow horror to flourish in the school playground and in the bedroom and the living-room. So it's a story of coming of age during the Second World War in Nazi Europe, like Die Blechtrommel, with the difference that there is no fantastical element, just a blurring of the narrator's identity between 'Louis' and 'ik'. Louis himself has his horizons broadened by a Hitler Youth trip to Mecklenburg in eastern Germany, where he stays briefly with a much more affectionate family than his own and then again when his father brings him to Brussels, a place of unspeakable pleasures, and he gets a magical afternoon of cultural awakening browsing in a library of confiscated 'degenerate' books, while prisoners are being interrogated (and perhaps worse) in the courtyard outside. His mother finds her own accommodation with the Germans to get lipstick and sausages, and also to get the emotional satisfaction her husband is incapable of supplying. Louis' father, a printer whose politics have always been pro-Nazi, finds it surprisingly tough to make ends continue to meet with his heroes in charge. Then, of course, the Germans invade and occupy Belgium. Though we did not have quite the same reverence for the British royals that Louis' relatives have for their Belgian equivalents. Obviously I found nothing there that related to my own experience of growing up in Belfast during the Troubles at all.

The first third or so is set in the years leading up to the war our protagonist (who veers between third-person 'Louis' and first-person 'ik', sometimes several times on the same page) attends a school run by nuns carrying forth the mission of educating reluctant Catholic kids in a divided society on the verge of horrendous conflict, where he hangs out with a small group of friends with shared odd literary interests. I very much enjoyed the start of the book, and it was enough to keep me going to the end. It took me almost a month, though as you will have noticed, I managed to read one or two other books along the way as well. I read it in the original Dutch, and at 715 pages I think that is the longest book I have ever read in a language other than English. NwhyteThis is another of those classic Belgian novels, a largely autobiographical account of a boy growing up in rural Flanders in the years just before, during and after the Second World War.

Het verdriet van België by Hugo Claus