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ISBN 978-0-9800330-1-4
In his novels, Hugo Claus lays bare the haunted underbelly of twentieth-century Flanders with portaits of a shattered society and warped psyches rising to a mythic pitch. In Wonder, Victor-Denijs de Rijckel, a bewildered schoolteacher, is led to a distant village in pursuit of a mysterious woman. Tracking her to an underground political conference in a remote castle, he poses as an expert on Crabbe, a messianic Belgian fascist who disappeared in World War II. Drifting into a dense fog as his sanity begins to crumble, de Rijckel soon finds himself trapped among a handful of desperate individuals still living out the consequences of their collaboration with the Nazis decades earlier, all of whom are united by their belief that Crabbe's return is imminent. The subtle cadences of the prose and the dense emotional texture of characters lost in complex moral labyrinths make Wonder a symphony only Claus could have composed.
Click here for video of Michael Henry Heim discussing Wonder.
To speak today of a still largely-unknown major work on European Fascism . . . seems presumptuous, rather like announcing the existence of, if not a new continent, at least a land mass of strange and significant proportions. But in discussing Wonder, it would be churlish not to admit to an explorer’s exhilaration at discovery.
"—Sam Munson, The National
We cannot accept the world as it is, Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth from the injustice of things.
"—Hugo Claus
The greatest writer of my generation.
"—Remco Campert
Claus's work is just as broad as the soul is deep.
"—Gerrit Komrij
While fully aware that such an honorable title can only be used in great exceptions in Flemish literature, I would call Wonder a masterpiece.
"—Paul de Wispelaere, Vlaamse Gids
Claus rages against the decay of the physical self while desire remains untamed. From the beginning, his poetry has been marked by an uncommon mix of intelligence and passion, given expression in a medium over which he has such light-fingered control that art becomes invisible.
"—J.M. Coetzee