 |
|
Saturday 10th May |
|
|||||||
|
||||||||
Hugo ClausPosted at 8:16AM Thursday 27 Mar 2008 Hugo Claus, who died on March 19 aged 78, was a versatile and prolific author best known for his sprawling, impressionistic, semi-autobiographical novel The Sorrow of Belgium (1983), in which he threw an unpitying spotlight on bourgeois Flemish society.The novel explored life under the Nazi occupation through the eyes of a teenage boy, and exploded the myth of widespread resistance that provided Belgium with a thin comfort blanket after the war, exposing the extent of collaboration, hypocrisy, religious bigotry and wilful ignorance that had enabled the Nazis to dispose of some 40,000 Belgian Jews with barely a whisper of protest.
Get book trade news by email
|
|
||||