Stefan Hertmans

Not every novel moves you, or holds your attention. And it's certainly not every novel that forces you to reconsider what a novel is, or could be. But this was definitely the case with War and Turpentine, Stefan Hertmans's penetrating account of the First World War. 

No doubt, Hertmans owes much to the late W. G. Sebald, and War and Turpentine is evocative of his work (including, most notably, Austerlitz and The Emigrants). Like Sebald, Hertmans explores the line between history and fiction, weaving stories that feel real, or historical, but which exist, despite that sense of gravity, in the fictional realm. This dynamic is reinforced by Hertmans's use of photography, which further endows his narrative with that historical quality made famous by Sebald. 

But Hermans charts new territory, too: unlike Sebald, who focused much of his work on the Second World War, War and Turpentine takes the Great War as its subject. At it core, Hertmans's novel is a paean to neutral Belgium, and commemoration of the trauma its population and soldiers experienced at the hands of its ambitious neighbor to the east. 

War and Turpentine is a rousing success, a deep and moving novel that cuts across time and generations, and that reminds us that the past, while gone perhaps from view, is still very much with us, and has a surprising, almost mystical, ability to emerge when we least expect it.