Chapel Road by Louis Paul Boon (.PDF)
File Size: 19.6 MB
Chapel Road by Louis Paul Boon, Translated from Flemish by Adrienne Dixon
Requirements: .PDF reader, 19.6 MB
Overview: In form and content, Chapel Road by Flemish writer Louis-Paul Boon is as unorthodox and uncomfortable as it is fascinating. The novel confronts the reader with the decline and fall of the ideal of a just and prosperous world for all mankind. But it is much more than a chronicle of the initial struggles and ultimate corruption of West European socialism. Chapel Road and its most notable inhabitant, Ondineke, parabolically reflect the human condition in a tale of yearning and failure, hope and despair, love and humiliation in a ninteenth-century Flemish small-town setting. The narrative perspective is intricate and involves the use of a highly organized montage technique. An auctorial figure and his friends reminisce about the years of the Nazi occupation and provide running comment on their own post-World War II reality. They also discuss the progress of the Ondinekebook itself, and one of the characters intersperses the novel with tendentiously rewritten scenes from the medieval animal epic of Reynard the Fox. The central story is: thus refracted in a labyrinth of language that affords the reader many striking, shocking, or amusing vistas, and finally brings him face to face with–himself. Chapel Road, written in 1953, has won admiration and praise in Belgium and the Netherlands and is a significant contribution to the contemporary, art of the novel.
Genre: Fiction > General Fiction/Classics
Free Download links: