In this atmospheric prose work poet and novelist Patrick McGuinness embarks on a journey of rediscovery around the French-speaking Belgian town of Bouillon, home of his mother’s family and of his own childhood. Starting in the stories he tells his Welsh-speaking children about their Belgian relatives, he retraces his own early years through a series of affectionate but sharply observed vignettes, peeling away layers of memory like fading wallpaper. In exploring the roots of his own identity he also uncovers and reappropriates the complex, remarkable life of this apparently unremarkable town in a too-often disregarded corner of western Europe. Extraordinary, even Rabelaisian, characters leap off the page, comfortable in their eccentricities, their voices reaching us through the atmospheric distortion of time past, but their echoes redolent of the fast-disappearing history of individuals, buildings, businesses, dialect and tradition. Photographs of places and artefacts anchor the narrative visually and deepen the sense of mystery, loss and love.
This ‘journey into memory’ is no mere personal odyssey, but an original and playful reinvention of the genre of memoir, written with humour and lyricism, the style encompassing every mood from the earthy to the elegiac. As the short, almost self-contained, narratives accumulate, they form a sustained and vivid meditation on the nature of memory and Proustian recovery of past time.
208pp
Peter Straus
Rogers Coleridge & White
20 Powis Mews
London W11 1JN
peters@rcwlitagency.com
www.rcwlitagency.com
France - Grasset
'McGuinness has written the great book on Belgium and modern memory, or even Belgium and modern being. He takes his place among those singers and painters of the haunted, the melancholy, the diminished, the caricatural, the humdrum: Ensor, Rodenbach, Sax, Huysmans, Simenon and Magritte.'
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