Narrative
Elias, or The Struggle with the Nightingales
Elias of het gevecht met de nachtegalen
Maurice Gilliams · 1936
Synopsis
On a country estate, in a castle inhabited by a French-speaking bourgeois family, Elias, aged twelve, stays among elderly and tormented relatives: his grandmother, his aunts Theodora, Zénobie and Henriëtte, and his uncle Augustin. He becomes attached to his cousin Aloysius, four years his senior: together they sail paper boats on the stream that borders the park and cross it one night to dance around a fire with two girls. But Aloysius leaves for boarding school, and Elias is left alone with an imagination that both draws and frightens him.
Context
The book appeared in 1936 from De Nederlandsche Boekhandel and Meulenhoff, in Antwerp and Amsterdam. The first version had two parts; from the second edition, in 1943, the second part was dropped, and the author kept retouching the text, which was fixed in seven chapters. He said he had followed sonata form, and critics note a style made of motifs that announce themselves, break off and return. The second part was reissued only in 2017. Saint-Rémy gave a French translation in 1968, André Lefevere an English translation in 1995.
Who it is for
A short narrative, in the first person and in the present tense, in a musical, slow prose; translated into French and English.
Prizes and reception
The book that made its author's breakthrough, included in the Flemish literary canon and read by present-day novelists such as Stefan Hertmans.
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