Synopsis
The work of historical fiction reconstructs the life of the narrator’s grandfather, Urbain Martien, before, during and after the First World War – as parts 1, 2 and 3 of the book. The narrator opens with a framing device, purporting to draw upon recollections in notebooks left him by the grandfather. (In an interview, Hertmans asserted that the novel indeed captures the memories of his own grandfather as recorded in a pair of notebooks decades after the war. “He gave me the notebooks a few months before he died, in 1981.” [4] The novel’s narrator left the notebooks unread, until gaining the wherewithal to face the material, and then to re-work them into a work of fiction, some thirty years later—the hundredth anniversary of the war.
The main character, Urbain Martien, was raised in a suburban quarter of Ghent during the belle-époque, and was devoted to his Roman Catholic faith. His father, Franciscus Martien, worked as a fresco painter for parish churches in the Low Countries and finally, in England. Urbain, in turn, acquired an interest in drawing and painting from his father. Urbain's mother, Céline Andries, endured the premature death of her husband, remarried, and saw her son Urbain off to work in a foundry and then, in 1914, off to war.
At the outbreak of the Great War, the 23 year-old Urbain is sent to the front, where he becomes a disciplined soldier and decorated combat hero, and ever the dutiful . The agonies of trench warfare are described “from up close.” Injuries take Ubain to recover in Liverpool—coincidentally the site of one of his father's paintings.
In the third section, Urbain returns home, falls in love with Maria Emelia Ghys, a step-sister. Before he can marry, the story takes a tragic turn, when Maria succumbs in the Spanish flu epidemic. Urbain marries Maria's sister Gabrielle, producing a daughter (the narrator's mother) in 1922, but the union lacks the affection Urbain had known with Maria Emielia. Urbain continues as a devoted artist (and especially as a copyist) into early retirement and until his death. The grandson, the narrator, visits sites in West Flanders and reviews personal archival materials, in an attempt to understand, even reconstruct, something of his grandfather's life experiences.
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