Overview

Bruges-la-Morte, which first appeared in 1892, concerns the fate of Hugues Viane, a widower who has turned to the melancholy, decaying city of Bruges as the ideal location in which to mourn his wife and as a suitable haven for the narcissistic perambulations of his inexorably disturbed spirit. Bruges, the 'dead city', becomes the image of his dead wife and thus allows him to endure, to manage the unbearable loss by systematically following its mournful labyrinth of streets and canals in a cyclical promenade of reflection and allusion. The story itself centres around Hugues' obsession with a young dancer whom he believes is the double of his beloved wife. The consequent drama leads Hugues onto a plank walk of psychological torment and humiliation, culminating in a deranged murder. This is a poet's novel and is therefore metaphorically dense and visionary in style. It is the ultimate evocation of Rodenbach's lifelong love affair with the enduring mystery and haunting mortuary atmosphere of Bruges. AUTHOR: Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898) born in Tournai, spent most of his time in Ghent and later Paris where like his childhood friend and Flemish compatriot Emile Verhaeren, he rubbed shoulders with all the main players of the symbolist fin de siecle. But Rodenbach is forever associated with Bruges, the location for his most celebrated and enduring work. He also wrote a number of collections of poetry of which 'Le Regne du silence' from 1891 in many ways prefigures Bruges-La-Morte. A further novel 'Le Carilloneur' 1897 (translated by Dedalus as The Bells of Bruges) is also set in Bruges. Several books of short stories such as Hans Cadzand's Vocation and Other Stories (Dedalus 2011 ) , prose poems, and a range of essays on figures such as Rodin, Monet, Huysmans, Verlaine and Mallarme attest to a prodigious talent. Rodenbach was a typical artist of the decadent period, unfailingly anti-bourgeois, solitary, an aesthete suffering some undisclosed malady of the spirit, a palpable ennui or spleen. But Rodenbach was very much a modern poet too and his precise, delicate, yet existentially muscular poems are still of much relevance today.

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There is an opiatic quality to the writing which at its best hovers on poetry's border. Hugues's relationship with the dancer who closely resembles his dead wife provides the plot, but the book's real heart lies in the descriptions of Bruges itself, and its 'amalgam of greyish drowsiness'. The Times A precursor to W G Sebald, a Symbolist vision of the city that lays the way for Aragon & Joyce, and a macabre story of obsessive love & transfiguring horror that is midway between Robert Browning & Tod Browning. Bruges, an amalgam of greyish drowsiness , is the setting and spur.' Scotland on Sunday 'Bruges evoked in melancholy imagery, in this new translated Symbolist novel.' Summer Reading Recommendations in The Financial Times

Author Information

Georges Rodenbach (1855-1898) born in Tournai, spent most of his time in Ghent and later Paris where like his childhood friend and Flemish compatriot Emile Verhaeren, he rubbed shoulders with all the main players of the symbolist fin de siecle. But Rodenbach is forever associated with Bruges, the location for his most celebrated and enduring work. He also wrote a number of collections of poetry of which 'Le Regne du silence' from 1891 in many ways prefigures Bruges-La-Morte. A further novel 'Le Carilloneur' 1897 (translated by Dedalus as The Bells of Bruges) is also set in Bruges. He has published over eighty translations from German.. His translation of Rosendorfer's Letters Back to Ancient China won the 1998 Schlegel-Tieck Translation Prize after he had been shortlisted in previous years for his translations of Stephanie by Herbert Rosendorfer and The Golem by Gustav Meyrink. His translations have been shortlisted four times for The Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize: Simplicissimus by Johann Grimmelshausen in 1999, The Other Side by Alfred Kubin in 2000, The Bells of Bruges by Georges Rodenbach in 2008 and The Lairds of Cromarty by Jean Pierre Ohl in 2013. Alan Hollinghurst is the author of four novels, The Swimming-Pool Library, The Folding Star, The Spell and The Line of Beauty. He has received the Somerset Maugham Award and the James Tait Black Memorial for Fiction, and he was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1994 and won the prize in 2004.

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