Brutal and Tender: On Stefan Hertmans’s ‘War and Turpentine’

Two autumns ago, I was walking past one of the many magnificent bookshops that dot the city of Cologne when a hand-painted sign in the window caught my eye: NOBELPREIS FÜR LITERATUR, PATRICK MODIANO.  Arrayed around the sign were dozens of books by Patrick Modiano — most of them in German, a few in French, none in English.

Patrick Who?

Only one way to find out.  I walked into the shop and introduced myself to the woman behind the cash register as an American writer visiting from New York.  Then I came clean: “I’m ashamed to admit it, but I’ve never even heard of Patrick Modiano.  Is he any good?”

“Oh yes,” replied the woman, who, like most bookshop workers in old Europe, was fluent in English and appallingly well read.  “He’s French and he’s quite good.  You should definitely read him.  Start with his first novel, La Place de l’Étoile.  Or Dora Bruder.”
On that day I made a vow to mix more foreign fiction into my reading diet, which is not an easy thing to do because only three percent of the books published in America every year are translations, and a fraction of those are new fiction and poetry.  When I got home I didn’t go to the recommended Modiano titles but instead read his Suspended Sentences, which Yale University Press had just rushed to market to take advantage of the Nobel announcement. The book was, as advertised, quite good, three autobiographical novellas spun around Modiano’s life-long obsessions — the German occupation of his native Paris during the Second World War, and its endless repercussions.

Since then I have been less than religious about living up to my Cologne vow, but there have been some wondrous discoveries. The latest is the new novel War and Turpentine by the Flemish writer Stefan Hertmans, a book that rips your guts out with one hand and breaks your heart with the other. It is a dissection of that most purely European of follies, the First World War — sometimes called “The Great War” — and it could not possibly have been written by an American. It is why foreign fiction is so vital, so valuable, and so necessary.

Crisply translated from the Dutch by David McKay, War and Turpentine is narrated in the first person by an unnamed writer, presumably a stand-in for Hertmans, who feels duty-bound to tell us the story of the remarkable life of his grandfather, Urbain Martien, a decorated veteran of the First World War who lived from 1891 to 1981 — “a life that spanned nearly a century and began on a different planet.” The centennial of the First World War is approaching, and the narrator is torn over what to do with the two journals his grandfather completed shortly before his death: on the one hand, he knows that the journals belong in a First World War archive; on the other, he’s wary of adding to the “almost unscalable mountain” of existing books about the war. The narrator doesn’t name names, but he was probably thinking of the immortal writings of Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owen, or possibly Paul Fussell’s The Great War and Modern Memory, Erich Maria Remarque’s All Quiet on the Western Front, Geoff Dyer’s splendid The Missing of the Somme, or any of 1,000 other titles.  The narrator’s wariness about adding to that mountain is understandable.  Yet he soldiers on.

The novel is divided into three parts. The first is an account of Urbain’s impoverished childhood in Ghent, where his father was a modestly talented and chronically broke “church painter.”  The second is a harrowing record of the horrors Urbain witnessed and endured — and inflicted — in the trenches as a naïve young conscript in the Flemish army during the bloodbath of the First World War.  We get it all: mortar bombs, whizz-bangs, bleeding gums, shrapnel, machine guns, diarrhea, rats, night terror, condescending and inept French officers, bullets from the sky, and, most dreaded of all, mustard gas.  After you’ve had your guts ripped out, the final section of the novel breaks your heart by recounting Urbain’s life after the war, when he found and lost true love, settled into a cool but not loveless marriage, took up painting in earnest (mostly copies of masterpieces, with a few startling exceptions), and finally reckoned with the delayed aftershocks of his wartime traumas. The novel is nothing less than a recounting, through one man’s life, of how the innocence of the 19th century was obliterated by the 20th, what the narrator calls “the most ruthless century in all human history.” Actually, this is less a novel than an act of historical reconstruction, a blending of forms that carries echoes of the great W.G. Sebald, right down to the uncaptioned photographs. There’s even an epigraph from Sebald’s Vertigo: “He would never have believed, he observed, how long the days, and time, and life itself could be when one had been shunted aside.”

This impressionistic, largely plotless tale pivots on a discovery Urbain makes during the war, while he’s on a convalescent stay in Liverpool after taking a bullet in the groin. (It’s one of several near-fatal wounds he will suffer.)  One day he wanders aimlessly through the streets until he comes to a nondescript church.  After praying, he is stunned to realize that one of the frescoes was painted by his father, who had taken an overseas commission in Liverpool when Urbain was a boy. It’s a quietly magical moment in the midst of the war’s noisy horror.

The experience of wounded soldiers convalescing amid cosseted English civilians during the war is central to Henry Green’s novel Back, which is based on his parents’ decision to open up their large country house as a convalescent home for wounded officers. Here is Green’s telling of a privileged English boy’s memory of the experience:

As the officers were badly needed back in France they did not stay for long. Each holiday from school there was a new outfit and better still we got the most marvellous food because we were feeding them up to go back to be killed.

The notion of feeding them up on marvellous food so they could go back to be killed – it captures the insanity of the Great War, of all wars. And War and Turpentine captures that insanity through the life of one faceless, fascinating, heart-breaking Flemish soldier. Stefan Hertmans is the author of previous novels, poetry, and plays, but this is his first novel to be translated into English. American readers are fortunate he had the courage to make this brutal and tender addition to the unscalable mountain.

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