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A review by oblomov
Bruges-La-Morte by Georges Rodenbach
2.0
Year of New Authors
A widower moves to Bruges to dedicate himself to a life of mourning, complete with rituals and a shrine to his lost beloved. All is miserably perfect until he chances upon a woman who perfectly resembles his late spouse.
Bruges-La-Morte seemed to be heralded as some quintessential example of Symbolist literature, but I'd call it more a bingo card than a decent story. We have the cold and wanton harpy, rampantly macabre morbidity, divine Catholicism, gothic setting- Full House!, I'll take the Debussy CD and Classism for Beginners prizes, please.
Our tale of lust and devotion unfortunately fails as it excludes the most crucial aspect of all tragedies, in that we're supposed to have at least half a gnat's foreskin worth of sympathy for the characters. Our protagonist's only personality trait is guilt and his fixation with his dead wife, the doppelganger lover is a puddle in depth and a spoilt brat, his maid is a piously cantankerous old biddy, and anyone else even barely mentioned are slimey peeping toms and rabid gossipers. Everyone was so boring, shallow or utterly unlikeable that even the bad ending didn't offer cartharthis.
If there's a saving grace it is the prose, with beautiful depictions of Catholic ceremonies and the true star of the show, the city of Bruges itself. It's frequently labelled a dead town by the author, a zombie of decaying architecture and filled with people who don't seem to notice they are wraiths of a past long gone, simply waiting for death. Bruges is presented as wonderfully eerie in long descriptions which mercifully interupted the boring love affair, but Rodenbach's complete lack of subtlety with this important symbol of the protagonist's psyche damages the power it could have had.
This is a rather forgettable and unoriginal story of corrupted memory and horniness, and it's only worth today is if someone asks what the Symbolist genre is, so you can point and say 'pretty much that, but as a dull checklist of themes'. Mediocre with some glinting fool's gold glued haphazardly to its facade, I don't understand why the book has earned any posterity, but it definitely deserves a very strongly worded cease and desist letter from the Bruges' Tourist Board.
A widower moves to Bruges to dedicate himself to a life of mourning, complete with rituals and a shrine to his lost beloved. All is miserably perfect until he chances upon a woman who perfectly resembles his late spouse.
Bruges-La-Morte seemed to be heralded as some quintessential example of Symbolist literature, but I'd call it more a bingo card than a decent story. We have the cold and wanton harpy, rampantly macabre morbidity, divine Catholicism, gothic setting- Full House!, I'll take the Debussy CD and Classism for Beginners prizes, please.
Our tale of lust and devotion unfortunately fails as it excludes the most crucial aspect of all tragedies, in that we're supposed to have at least half a gnat's foreskin worth of sympathy for the characters. Our protagonist's only personality trait is guilt and his fixation with his dead wife, the doppelganger lover is a puddle in depth and a spoilt brat, his maid is a piously cantankerous old biddy, and anyone else even barely mentioned are slimey peeping toms and rabid gossipers. Everyone was so boring, shallow or utterly unlikeable that even the bad ending didn't offer cartharthis.
If there's a saving grace it is the prose, with beautiful depictions of Catholic ceremonies and the true star of the show, the city of Bruges itself. It's frequently labelled a dead town by the author, a zombie of decaying architecture and filled with people who don't seem to notice they are wraiths of a past long gone, simply waiting for death. Bruges is presented as wonderfully eerie in long descriptions which mercifully interupted the boring love affair, but Rodenbach's complete lack of subtlety with this important symbol of the protagonist's psyche damages the power it could have had.
This is a rather forgettable and unoriginal story of corrupted memory and horniness, and it's only worth today is if someone asks what the Symbolist genre is, so you can point and say 'pretty much that, but as a dull checklist of themes'. Mediocre with some glinting fool's gold glued haphazardly to its facade, I don't understand why the book has earned any posterity, but it definitely deserves a very strongly worded cease and desist letter from the Bruges' Tourist Board.