Mizzlers

Patrick Parrinder

  • The Sorrow of Belgium by Hugo Claus, translated by Arnold Pomerans
    Viking, 609 pp, £14.99, June 1990, ISBN 0 670 81456 3
  • Joanna by Lisa St Aubin de Teran
    Virago, 260 pp, £12.95, May 1990, ISBN 1 85381 158 0
  • A Sensible Life by Mary Wesley
    Bantam, 364 pp, £12.95, March 1990, ISBN 0 593 01930 X
  • The Light Years by Elizabeth Jane Howard
    Macmillan, 418 pp, £12.95, June 1990, ISBN 0 333 53875 7

Half a century after it was fought, the Second World War is still being written, and still being judged. The run of new fiction, like the current debate over war crimes trials, bears witness to our continuing obsession with the events of 1939-45. Things silenced and hushed up, perhaps for good reasons, in the late Forties are now being disinterred and subjected to lengthy post-mortems. The question of collaboration amongst intellectuals in the occupied nations has again become a talking-point, thanks largely to the posthumous revelations about the Belgian-American literary theorist Paul de Man. But what about the ordinary people of the Low Countries? Hugo Claus’s The Sorrow of Belgium, a novel first published in Holland in 1983, presents a world in which collaboration with the Nazis is made to seem as inevitable as breathing.

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