Culture

Archipelago Books has just published Wonder, a translation of Flemish author Hugo Claus’ book De Verwondering, translated by Michael Henry Heim.
 

In his Faulknerian novels, Hugo Claus (1929-2008) mixes expertly crafted stories of postwar Flanders with poignant psychological portraits rich in mythological and literary allusion. In Wonder, a landmark of Flemish literature, Claus mixes the souls of a handful of displaced and desperate individuals with the backdrop of Flanders and visions of the Polish and Russian fronts of WWII. The dense emotional texture of the characters entangled in complex moral labyrinths combined with a deep feeling for Flemish history make the novel a symphony that only Hugo Claus could have composed.
 

Hugo Claus, author of dozens of plays, novels, and collections of poetry, is arguably the most important Belgian writer of the twentieth century. His most celebrated novel is The Sorrow of Belgium (1983). Hugo Claus was the wonder boy of Flemish literature for more than half a century. Apart from being an extraordinarily productive and highly regarded poet, he was an equally productive and regarded writer of stories, novels, film scripts, libretti and plays, as well as a stage and film director, an artist and a translator. He wrote more than a hundred literary works, with which he won more than forty literary prizes. His extreme versatility earned him the nickname ‘the Wizard’. For the kaleidoscopic diversity of his output he was dubbed the ‘Proteus of Dutch letters’.
 

Michael Henry Heim is the winner of the 2005 Helen and Kurt Wolff Translator's Prize, the ALTA Translation Prize, and the AATSEEL Award. He has translated the work of Günter Grass, Milan Kundera, Bohumil Hrabal, and Péter Esterházy.
 

Archipelago Books is a not-for-profit literary press dedicated to promoting cross-cultural exchange through international literature in translation.
 

For more information on Wonder, visit www.archipelagobooks.org