Louis Paul Boon

Louis Paul Boon (15 March 1912, in Aalst – 10 May 1979, in Erembodegem) was a Flemish novelist and competes with Hugo Claus (1929-2008) only for the title of most important twentieth-century Flemish writer in the Dutch language. He forsook the literary Dutch of the Netherlands for regional Belgian Dutch words and expressions with which he colored his writing in a Faulknerian way.

He was born Lodewijk Paul Aalbrecht Boon in Aalst, Belgium to a working-class family. When he was very young Boon witnessed the shooting of a prisoner by a German soldier, otherwise the First World War, which ended when Boon was only six years old, left little traces in his writings. Boon left school at age 16 to work for his father as a carriage painter. During evenings and weekends he studied art at the Aalsterse Academie voor Schone Kunsten but soon had to abandon his studies due to lack of funds. As a literary author Boon was not an early bloomer. During the 1930s he tried time and again to write something worthwhile, but in vain. Yet as the 1940s took off, he matured and wrote his first published works in a row, including a novel based upon the life of Vincent van Gogh, Abel Gholarts (1944, not available in translation).

At the onset of World War II Boon was a soldier in a division stationed near the village of Veldwezelt, in order to defend the Albert Canal. However, he was captured as a war prisoner on the first day and eventually sent home, after a few weeks in a prisoner camp. His experiences during the War and mostly the Occupation are the subject matter of Boon's fourth title, My Little War (1947, translation 2010 by Paul Vincent, Dalkey Archive Press), now widely regarded as a major masterpiece of Dutch literature of World War II. With this title Boon emerged for the first time as an important innovator of the novel. Rather than containing one story, "My Little War" contains over thirty loosely interrelated chapters, each containing a story that can be read as an independent piece. Most stories describe the difficult circumstances of life during the Occupation, such as finding food and fuel to warm the house, some deal with the deteriorating sexual mores, and some treat more direct war experiences such as bombings. Yet the overarching structure, though well hidden, makes for a coherent whole as well. The stories are interspersed with numerous raw fragments about equally raw incidents during the Occupation as the short stories: rape, theft, treason, humiliation. Boon admitted that the work of John Dos Passos provided the inspiration for this literary device. The term 'enemy' by no means signifies Germans exclusively, even though one story tells of the extermination of a Jewish girl and another of a camp prisoner's experiences. People are just as likely, if not more, to be robbed of food, money, or even their spouse's fidelity by their neighbours as they are by the Germans.

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