Novel
Wrakken
Not translated into English
Emmanuel de Bom · 1898
Opening lines
Met verroesten kiel en beschadigden boeg was de Valdemar de haven binnengeloopen, en lag nu sedert drie dagen vastgemeerd in het Groote Dok om zijn lading te lossen.
With rusted keel and damaged bow the Valdemar had come into port, and had now lain moored for three days in the Great Dock to unload its cargo.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from dbnl.org
Synopsis
Antwerp, at the end of the century. In the port, the Valdemar is being unloaded; in the evening, one of its sailors, William Breede, wanders the streets, thinks of the vanity of his life and enters a tavern where Elly serves, a pretty waitress from Danzig, who has a child. He asks her to marry him that very evening. But Elly is also the mistress of Richard Koenen, a young man of good family whom this liaison has made gloomy and whom his mother no longer recognises. Each of the two men believes he can save her, and she hesitates between them.
Context
The novel appeared in May 1898 in the review its author had co-founded five years earlier, then as an eighty-eight-page offprint. It comes from lived experience: in 1891, the author had fallen in love with a German café singer, the mother of a small boy, whom he met at the music hall in the bargemen's district, a liaison his family viewed unfavourably. Reissued in 1938 with a preface by Maurice Gilliams, it is cited by literary histories for its psychology and for the atmosphere of the city.
Who it is for
A short novel, in twelve chapters, dark and carefully written; no French or English translation has been found.
Prizes and reception
Regarded by Britannica and by the Encyclopedia of the Flemish Movement as the first urban psychological novel in Flemish literature.
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