June 5, 2023
Flemish Belgian writer Hertmans (The Convert) delivers a thoughtful and unflinching narrative in which he imagines the life of his Ghent home’s previous owner, who was an SS officer. Hertmans purchased the mildew-covered house as a young man in 1979. In 2000, he discovered it was formerly occupied by Willem Verhulst and his family. Recreating the lives of the Verhulst family during the grisly period of Nazi occupation from 1940 to 1945 and beyond, Hertmans chronicles how Willem becomes a high-ranking Nazi informant, traces his exploits as a Flemish nationalist rabble rouser after WWII, and explores his romantic attachments—particularly to his Jewish first wife, Elsa, who died in 1926, and with whom he requested to be buried. The most fascinating character is Mientje, Verhulst’s second wife and the mother of his children, who despises the SS, but loves her husband, despite his affair with devoted Nazi Griet, whom he marries after Mientje’s death. Hertmans adds nuance by drawing on interviews with Verhulst’s daughters Letta and Suzanne, now in their 80s, and the memoirs of Verhulst’s son, Adriaan, who was Hertmans’s history professor in the 1970s. Images of Elsa’s death certificate and other documents, along with excerpts from various letters and journals, convey the depth of the author’s immersion. In Hertmans’s hands, the dusty rooms of history come alive.
August 1, 2023
The stories of a Belgian "Jew-hunter for the Waffen-SS," his family, and their home are reassembled through a combination of historical fact and the author's imagination. "In the first year of the new millennium, a book came into my hands from which I learned that for twenty years I had lived in the house of a former SS man." So begins Flemish author Hertmans' coolly intriguing re-creation of the life and circumstances of Willem Verhulst, whose commitment to Flemish Nationalism led to an allegiance with Hitler and the German Reich. Son of a "Bad" Fleming, the book that revealed the house's connection to the Nazis, was written by Verhulst's son, Adriaan, and lends much detail on the father's shameful story, as do various other sources, including the diaries of Adriaan's mother, Mientje, and the reminiscences of his two sisters. Verhulst's early life is quirky but inauspicious. The sight in one of his eyes is damaged in a convulsion. He studies horticulture in Brussels and takes a Jewish lover, Elsa Meissner, marrying her before her divorce is complete. Elsa succumbs to cancer, but before she dies Verhulst is already flirting with devout Mientje, who, as wife No. 2, will suffer worse from her husband's promiscuity. Resident in Ghent but often absent, Verhulst's politics align him so that when war begins and the Germans invade Belgium, he's happy to work for the occupiers and reap the benefits. Hertmans precisely locates Verhulst in the Ghent house, where Mientje forbids him to wear his SS uniform indoors though a bust of Hitler sits on a mantelpiece. His crimes are more outlined than specified, but the mood and the corruption are nicely mirrored in the rotting, tainted house Hertmans later buys and inhabits. As much a story of the family and the setting as of the horrible yet ludicrous figure at its center, the book, while overlong, delivers a haunting, detailed record of people, place, and atmosphere. A ghostly evocation of faded but eternally repulsive history.
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August 1, 2023
Hertmans' (The Convert, 2020) latest novel, like Juan Gabriel V�squez's Retrospective (2023), manifests as what might be called fictional nonfiction, in which the author enhances research compiled from documents and interviews with imagined depth and color. Hertmans evinces a rock-solid sense of place, and it is through location that he approaches his subjects. Discovering that he lived in a house in Ghent formerly owned by a Nazi collaborator, he experienced "the powerful pull of an unknown life" and set out to investigate. Through a series of anecdotes, he tells the story of Willem Verhulst, a one-eyed, womanizing "charmer" who begins with Flemish nationalism, slides into working for Nazi-run Radio Flanders, and ends up as a member of the SS. His mortified, long-suffering wife, "burdened with an extremely logical mind" and devoutly Christian, suffers undeserved consequences both before and after her husband's transgressions finally catch up to him. Hertmans' impressionistic prose is deeply evocative, and the novel reads like a fascinating conversation, drawing on the storyteller's absorption with his subject matter and intimate knowledge of the characters involved.
COPYRIGHT(2023) Booklist, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.