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A review by nickolette
Christ's Entry into Brussels by David Colmer, Dimitri Verhulst
In the original Flemish cover of the book, one can see through James Ensor’s famous (post-impressionist) painting of the same name. The vibe of both is befittingly similar – a city in decay, filled with sinners, freaks, inequality, and suffering. Pretty much the vision of morally bankrupt Brussels whether you ask a conservative Bulgarian or any Flemish person under the grey Belgian sky.
I have always lived in towns and cities where I needed to push myself to find their charm and start loving them. Difficult places to manage, yes, but mostly difficult on the eye. It is exactly in an effort to make Brussels more aesthetically poetic that I picked up the English edition form a second-hand bookstore near Flagey and it jumped the queue of carefully curated readings I had lined up for myself.
I was initially impressed by Verhulst’s Het leven gezien van beneden translated into Bulgarian as Животът, гледан отдолу in which he is not just accurate and well informed of an obscure place like Sofia, Bulgaria and in a specific point in time, but he also got the subtleties in the humour, the cynicism that was omnipresent and just the overall vibe. Now Brussels is his town (I think), and he takes us through neighbourhoods, metro stations, parks which I know and can envision. The coming of Christ is a cool way to talk about the city and this is what I had hoped for. There are bigger themes, such as Belgium’s place in Europe, religious hypocrisy, human nature, sometimes pointed with nothing more than a witty one-liner.
Simultaneously reading The Belgian Labyrinth by Geert van Istendael, a historical account that reads like a student book, I find this fictional story the more reliable source of the two. Which says something.
I have always lived in towns and cities where I needed to push myself to find their charm and start loving them. Difficult places to manage, yes, but mostly difficult on the eye. It is exactly in an effort to make Brussels more aesthetically poetic that I picked up the English edition form a second-hand bookstore near Flagey and it jumped the queue of carefully curated readings I had lined up for myself.
I was initially impressed by Verhulst’s Het leven gezien van beneden translated into Bulgarian as Животът, гледан отдолу in which he is not just accurate and well informed of an obscure place like Sofia, Bulgaria and in a specific point in time, but he also got the subtleties in the humour, the cynicism that was omnipresent and just the overall vibe. Now Brussels is his town (I think), and he takes us through neighbourhoods, metro stations, parks which I know and can envision. The coming of Christ is a cool way to talk about the city and this is what I had hoped for. There are bigger themes, such as Belgium’s place in Europe, religious hypocrisy, human nature, sometimes pointed with nothing more than a witty one-liner.
Simultaneously reading The Belgian Labyrinth by Geert van Istendael, a historical account that reads like a student book, I find this fictional story the more reliable source of the two. Which says something.