"War and Turpentine" was born out of an unexpected and perhaps unwanted gift.
One day Stephen Hartmans, a respected Flemish writer, received from his grandfather, Orba Martin, a bundle of beautifully arranged notebooks - memories of his childhood and service as a soldier in the "Great War", World War I.
Shortly afterwards the grandfather parted from the world, and the notebooks left for the grandson drew him, unwillingly, on a long journey of discovery on the way to personal and family cellars of memory, in which a shocking and essential past for understanding the present is locked.
I'm not sure anyone would really want to expose their beloved relatives in this way, without masks, retouching and beautification, almost naked. Apparently Hartmans also did not want to at first and refrained from reading in notebooks as much as he could, and yet the gift was stronger than him. This reading creates a hybrid affair, a kind of strange combination of things that happened in the life of the young Orba and the memory of the grandfather, an old man in a fancy blue-midnight suit, as preserved by the grandson.
The fabric of the story Hartmans weaves from hard raw materials - the circumstances of his grandfather's poverty as a small child and the horrors of the First World War, in which the grandfather fought in the trenches.
Although these are not the kind of things that are easy to read, the experience of diving into the world of "War and Turpentine" is actually pleasant.
It is a rich and enriching novel, a poetic and visceral journey into Europe of a century ago, so different from the idyllic picture that is reflected in our consciousness now.
Hartmans leads himself and the reader across a bridge that the grandfather's diaries stretched between today and yesterday, and contrary to expectations, walking backwards - in time and in reality - shakes, swallows, confuses and eats, but at the same time also reconciles.
Many novels have been written about the war that marked the end of the age of innocence, and about the millions of people who filled its endless fields of carnage, fearful, subdued or indifferent.
Like the other great documentarians, Urba Martin was there, and the validity of his descriptions, which skimp on sentimentality, was derived from the status of the participating witness.
When he, or rather Hartmans from his mouth, recalls how the earth shook and splashed during the shelling, how trees creaked to the ground, how crows pecked at the bruised bellies of swollen horse carcasses, how the screams of the wounded pierced the trenches — precisely the daily tone of things fitting the reader. "This is a sentence to God that is devoid of God: our fate is doomed to an arbitrary law where the simplest movement may cost you your life," says Urba, and although we were not there with him, among piles of rotting equipment in water-soaked excavations, it seems the reconciliation with death Reads, without being able to take it out for many more days. Other than death only rats dominate the day-to-day of the digging world, unquestionably: "They are everywhere, we live with their shrill chirps, they run between our legs, gnaw on anything, loose or tied, they stink and mate, litter and thrive, eat our biscuits And gnaw at the dead soldiers, walk on your face at night,And if you kill one, five appear under it. "Sometimes the soldiers roast them, but even with muddy, sticky and repulsive flesh.
Like the masses of his friends in the trenches of death and death, the young Orba was thrown into the inferno of war from a life of poor but peaceful citizenship. His father was a church painter, and following him Orba was drawn to the art of painting and captivated by its charms. His view of the world has always been that of an artist, and the years of war and suffering have not changed that. Perhaps even the opposite: only he was able to discern the shades of the sky as he lay with his soldiers in a frozen forest with no food and water, surrounded by the enemy and shot like animals in the range. Only a sensitive and compassionate artist's eye finds a poetic touch in any situation, difficult and shocking as it may be, and such situations were not lacking for Urba's contemporaries.
The novel's special poetics culminates when Hartmans delves into his grandfather's great love, painting. Urba mainly made replicas of famous works by Dutch artists and great Flemish artists, and the writer is no less fascinated by them than his grandfather. He is able to tell about these paintings in meticulous detail by an art scholar, to focus on shades and shades, to notice every spark of movement, every crease in a garment or a momentary facial expression of any of the characters, but remarkably the descent into the small details is not oppressive. Hartmans' literary talent allows the reader to navigate two pages on a painting by St. Martin by Anthony Van Dyke in one breath, and even fall in love with it. Through the passion for painting, the resemblance between grandfather and grandson is revealed, the bond of generations floats that many prefer to ignore, or simply do not notice through the mantle of changes that have taken place in the world in the last century - and seemingly changed it,
Hartmans' search for his grandfather's mysteries is not limited to the events of the war, although it naturally occupies a central place in it, as does art. He travels following his grandfather to England, where Urba was hospitalized following an injury; To Italy, from which the grandfather in his later years brought a painted stone, a standard-looking tourist souvenir that also creates a story; Velgent, to the monument of a pilot, the object of admiration of the boy Urba. However, most of the discovery is not geographical and does not require travel. It takes place deep inside, in the middle between tangible memory and consciousness that is not bound to an item or object.
Hartmans imagines the era his protagonists lived in, and a living animal imagines them too, a long line of uncles and aunts rising from the abyss of oblivion, gaining skin and tendons, returning to a beloved armchair, cane or pipe.
He reads the memories over and over again, and these fit into his own life, completing them to the point that it is difficult to distinguish between an imaginary world elevated from the sorcerer to reality.
Or is it not a resemblance at all, because if the memory of the past is no less real than the present, and together they create the future of each of us.
I wish every grandfather would leave behind a bundle of notebooks.
Stephen Hartmans / War and Turpentine;
Flemish: Irish Bauman, Modan, 303 pages