The Ascent
This novel is part of the more recent trend towards what is called autofiction, in which writers incorporate elements of their own lives into literary works. While there is usually an underlying foundation of truth, the publication is classified as fiction and a work of imagination. The most renowned exponent is perhaps Karl Ove Knausgaard, and the technique can be particularly applicable to historical fiction as it mostly involves dredging up elements of a writer’s past existence, very often delving into distant years before the writer was born. The trouble with autofiction is that the reader often spends time while reading the narrative wondering just what is true and what has been invented by the writer. “Did this person really exist and do this?” they mentally quiz themselves, which can detract a little from the immediate pleasure of the reading process.
In this case Hertmans tells of buying a dilapidated house in Ghent in Belgium many years ago and only subsequently finding out in 2000 that the house once belonged to Willem Verhulst, a Flemish S.S. officer in wartime Belgium. Born in 1898 and growing up in Antwerp, Verhulst’s childhood and development into an extreme right-wing collaborator with the German occupying forces are described via documentary sources. The recreation of early 20th-century Belgium and Ghent is perfect. The narrative of Verhulst’s wartime shift to the Germans and subsequent fallout is captured with precision, and the real heroes in the story are his long-suffering wife, Mientje, and their children. The acts of revenge and desperate violence that came to these elegant towns and cities in northern Europe, with the changing tide in the war and Germany’s defeat, have still not been widely acknowledged, and Hertmans defines the brutality and harsh reality for the population of this cultured part of Europe while also delivering a novel of the highest literary imagination.
