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While the Gods Were Sleeping, by Erwin Mortier
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While the Gods Were Sleeping is a novel about the magnitude and impact of the First World War, the recollections of which are recorded in the notebooks of the elderly Helena. The young Helena is sent to her uncle’s country house before the war, and from here she witnesses scenes of indescribable horror. But it is also where she meets Matthew again, a British Army photographer who she goes on to marry. This is a story not about spectacular events; rather, Mortier is concerned with writing about war, history and the past with great empathy and engagement, and with a mixture of melancholy, qualification and resignation.
- Sales Rank: #3570340 in Books
- Published on: 2016-01-05
- Released on: 2016-01-05
- Original language: Dutch
- Number of items: 1
- Dimensions: 7.80" h x .90" w x 5.10" l, .65 pounds
- Binding: Paperback
- 356 pages
Review
"Mortier is superb. . . The push and pull of ugliness and beauty Helena witnessed plays into her conviction about humanity's random and godless state of existence, as the title suggests: 'give us back our mealy-mouthed petit-bourgeois world,' she writes, knowing that such comforts have been stripped from her. . . [an] ultimately poised consideration of war's long impact on feeling and faith." — Kirkus Reviews
"Like Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels, Erwin Mortier, the 49-year old Flemish writer whose four novels have just been published in North America, is a poetic prose artist. Unlike Ondaatje and Michaels, whose stock has fallen rather sharply in the last decade, Mortier writes stories that stick and characters whose oblique relationship to normalcy lodge themselves in our minds like splinters.… a quintessential and literally definitive work of Belgian literature" — The National Post
Praise from the UK:
"A beautifully unorthodox novel of the Great War... a kaleidoscopic palette." — Independent
"Almost too beautiful a writer... the footprint of Proust visible on every page." — Financial Times
"Sumptuously imagined." — Independent Best Translated Fiction 2014
"Visceral and heart-stopping...deeply and painfully moving... one of the finest war stories ever written." — NewBooks
"Sumptuously lyrical." — We Love this Book
Other praise from Europe:
"Mortier writes so well that you are inclined to see everything else as of secondary importance." — NRC Handelsblad
"A monumental, phenomenal book." — De Morgen
"Splendid control of language." — de Volkskrant
"The author skillfully reconstructs the crepuscular atmosphere of an era that ends with the shipwreck of a civilization, but, paradoxically, also with the sensual awakening of a young girl." — Figaro
"Threads the heavy folds of history with the needle of poetic sensibility." — Livres hebdo
"'Multi-layered' is too bland a word for this subtle, sophisticated novel, which moves between different times with such aplomb that the reader never loses the thread." — Buchmarkt
From the Hardcover edition.
About the Author
Erwin Mortier My Fellow Skin (2000) and Shutterspeed (2002) and the novella All Days Together (2004) quickly established his reputation as one of the leading authors of his generation. For While the Gods Were Sleeping (2008), a novel set against the backdrop of the First World War, he was awarded the prestigious AKO Literature Prize 2009. A consummate stylist, he offers evocative descriptions that bring past worlds brilliantly to life.
Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
I have always shrunk from the act of beginning. From the first word, the first touch. The restlessness when the first sentence has to be formed, and after the first the second. The restlessness and the excitement, as if you are pulling way the cloth beneath which a body rests: asleep or dead. There is also the desire, or the fantasy wish to beat the pen into a ploughshare and plough a freshly written sheet clean again, across the lines, furrow after furrow. Then I would look back at a snow-white field, at the remnants the plough blade has churned up: buckets rusted through, strands of barbed wire, splinters of bone, bed rails, a dud shell, a wedding ring.
I’d give a lot to be able to descend into the subterranean heart of our stories, to be lowered on ropes into their dark shafts and see stratum after stratum glide by in the lamplight. Everything the earth has salvaged: foundations, fence rails, tree roots, soup plates, soldiers’ helmets, the skeletons of animals and people in hushed chaos, the maelstrom congealed to a terrestrial crust that has swallowed us up.
I would call it the book of the shards, of the bones and the crumbs, of the lines of trees and the dead in the hole down to the cellar and the drinking bout at the long table. The book of mud too, of the placenta, the morass and the matrix.
I am grateful to the world for still having windowsills, and door frames, skirting boards, lintels and the consolation of tobacco, and black coffee and men’s thighs, that’s all. One fine day you’re too old to carry yourself gravewards hour after hour, to mutter the dies irae in porches, on street corners or in squares for so many figures who have long since flaked away from you, decayed into a squelchy mess your toes sink into. As you get older you no longer see people around you but moving ruins. Again and again the dead find back doors or kitchen windows through which to slip inside and haunt younger flesh with their convulsions. People are draughty creatures. We have memories to be able to tame the dead until they hang as still in our neurons as foetuses strangled by the umbilical cord. I fold their fingers and close their eyes, and if they sometimes sit up under their sheet I know it’s enzymes or acids strumming their tendons. Their true resurrection is elsewhere.
When I was young such daydreams invariably awakened my mother’s irritation, if I was unwise enough to confide them to her. She cherished a sacred awe of limits and barriers. Freeing your imagination from the earth was considered a sign of a frivolous disposition. For her the most unforgivable thing a living person could inflict on the dead was to make them speak; they can’t defend themselves against what you put into their mouths. In her eyes the coin that the Ancient Greeks put under the tongue of their dead, as the fare for the ferryman who was to transport them to the far bank of the Styx, had a different purpose: it was hush money. If the dead had started chattering, they would immediately have choked on the coin. They have no right to speak, she said, which is why no one must be their mouthpiece.
I myself have my doubts, still. Everything that lives and breathes is driven by a fundamental inertia, and everything that is dead keeps its vanished opportunities to exist shut up in itself like a hidden shame.
She would be over a hundred if she were still alive. Not that much older than me, who do my best not to put anything in her mouth, not even a coin. For that matter I don’t often think of death anymore. He thinks quite enough of me. Every morning after brushing my teeth I run my tongue over my teeth, proud I still have a full set, and read in braille the grin of the death’s head in my flesh. That suffices as a memento mori.
There are nights when sleep thrusts me myself up like a remnant from its depths, until I wake with the cold, pull the covers closer and wonder why an image that can sometimes be decades old imposes itself on me with such clarity that I wake up. It’s never anything dramatic. It may be the sight of a room, a landscape, a look from someone I’ve known or an incident without much significance – such as that Sunday morning, a spring day in the 1940s, when I am standing with my daughter at my living room window waiting for lunch. We are looking out, at the front garden and the roadway which are strewn with white dots. The wind is blowing them out of the tame chestnut trees on the far bank of the river across the water, making them swirl in miniature tornados over the roadway as if it is snowing. The silence in the streets that morning, the pale light, the Sunday boredom, the smell of soup and roast veal, and my daughter saying: ‘I thought it would rain any day.’
Or I am back on the beach, the broad beach at low tide, near the promenade, in the first chill of autumn, one of those days when you can extract the last warmth from the wind. I took my husband and my brother out, or vice-versa, to get some fresh air, rather than to be constantly breathing in that hospital smell. They are standing among the huts, out of the wind, in the sun, scarves round their necks, kepis on their heads, and around them the silver-white sand is sparkling. In a fit of humour they have pinned their medals on their pyjama tops and now they are giving each other a light, because I have brought cigarettes for them. They look pale, and frail, in that merciless light, full-frontal September light. Only their cheeks are flushed, bright-red.
The scene would have something closed-off about it, be forever self-contained, except that my husband, my future husband, suddenly looks me straight in the eye, from behind the fingers of my brother, who is shielding the flame of the match with his hand: amused, roguish, sharp – a pleasure in which I immediately recognise the intelligence. Meanwhile my brother is peeping intently at my husband. He is not so much scanning his profile as absorbing it with his look. I suddenly realise that we were married to the same man.
When I turn round I don’t see my room, my legs wrapped in blankets, or the board with the pen and paper on my lap, but the beach, the wide beach at low tide; the wind whipping up the water in the tidal pools, the thin white line of the surf, the grey-green water, the underside of the clouds, a friendly emptiness that draws me to it.
Most helpful customer reviews
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Witness to War
By Roger Brunyate
Are there any new ways left to write about the First World War? I do believe that Flemish author Erwin Mortier has found one, in the memories of an old Belgian woman who just happened to be on holiday at the other side of the front when war broke out. It is a dense, often oblique book, richly translated from the Dutch by Paul Vincent,* that puts the "literary" back into literary fiction. Get rid of that horrid plastic dust-cover, and you will feel a solid book in your hands, beautifully printed, containing words that have been polished with obvious care, and ideas and reflections well worth the polishing.
The narrator, born close to the beginning of the century, is Hélène Demont, a lifelong compulsive writer. Now a very old lady looked after by a kindly Moroccan nurse, she has filled notebooks her entire life with notes and observations. In the rather slow reflective start, I was thinking of her as a later, female Proust, with similar stylistic profusion, and similar alchemy with time. But then I read what she had to say about her great predecessor:
"When I read Proust for the first time after the war, it made me almost sick to my stomach. I didn't hear time, great dead time roaring through his sentences -- his Loire sentences, his Mississippi sentences, his grammatical River Congos and syntactical Nile deltas, pregnant with sentiment.
I heard ambulances wailing,
the wheels of hospital beds scooting over uneven floor tiles,
the hurried steps of stretcher-bearers,
the tinkling scalpels and surgical clamps [ . . . ]"
Glancing at some Dutch reviews of this novel (first published in 2009), I saw that the few negative comments included the slowness in getting moving, and the difficulty of establishing a time-line. Both are true, but they are not necessarily criticisms. While Hélène's riverine sentences can rival Proust's, she can move like the wind once she gets to describing detail. And what makes this so special as a First War novel is her unique viewpoint, not as a combatant, not as a sweetheart left pining at home, but an adolescent girl trying to do her growing-up in a village that just happens to be a few miles from the front. She is taken to the trenches early in the war as a visitor on a calm day, and cheered by the soldiers putting themselves out for her. There are few accounts here of the mud, the gangrene, and the gas, but her descriptions have their own devastation, like the little girl killed by a piece of shrapnel after trying her mother's rouge for the first time, or the farmhand who survived the entire war to return terrified by a threshing machine or the shoeing of a horse. The novel is full of telling vignettes, such as the row of helmets of different nationalities set out along the top of a dike, or the sight of soldiers bathing in the sea while offshore ships fire over their heads at the enemy beyond.
And what she does with time may be the best thing of all. While most of the book takes place between 1914 and 1919, it is the memories of a woman who has lived close on 100 years, a woman who has had a husband and a daughter of her own and has survived them both, a woman who carries her old age and childhood side by side in the same purse. It is a love story too, for a young English photographer called Matthew Herbert, who comes into her young life and will not let go, someone "who manifests himself as the question to answers piled up in you from long before you yourself could think." From almost the beginning, she refers to Matthew as her husband, but deliberately blurs the chronology, moving from their first meeting to years after the war, then back to their first lovemaking; Hélène is neither an angel nor a prude. Matthew's dialogue, apparently inappropriate to his class, is the one thing I would fault the translator for in a book that is otherwise a verbal feast.* But there is no doubt about Hélène's passion or the acuity of her vision, which shows the Great War with an intimate clarity that leaps over the intervening century as in a miracle.
*See the first comment.
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful.
A Meandering, Slow Novel with Occasional Moments of Beauty and Inspiration
By JD Cetola
This is a tough book to read. The writing, although translated from the Dutch to English, is often lovely and evocative, but equally often a strange combination matter-of-fact, over-wordy, and horrific. "While the Gods are Sleeping" reads like a meandering reflection of a nonagenarian's life with a focus on her childhood (teen years) in France during World War I. The first 100 pages or so are, to me anyway, a stream of consciousness, longwinded commentary in the present, nursing home life of the aged Helena (the female narrator), with the early 20th century reflections beginning nearly a third into the novel. It's a slow start for certain, and took some effort to stick with it.
I'm still not sure it was worth it, but the writing is at times lovely, evocative, reflective, thoughtful, and quite frankly, slow (painfully sloggish, or, boring at times). I'm not sure how much to put this at the blame of translation, my impatience, or the author, but this novel took more effort for me to get through than most. The narration provides an interesting perspective on the cost of war from a civilian observer's standpoint--as opposed to a participant--but the narrator's wordiness and overthinking, really bogged the story down. This is a very poetic and descriptive novel of WWI and early 20th century European life, but it is rather slow and requires persistence to get at the rewards that might not be frequent enough for many readers, including this one.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful.
Patience
By Irish
While The Gods Were Sleeping is the remembrance of an old woman. Her notebooks are filled with her life which included WWI. This tale won't be fore everyone because it can take several pages to describe one action. Events are drawn out in the smallest of detail in richly described sentences. Details of death and life linger and though they may have taken several minutes in life, every nuance is often rendered by Erwin Mortier-making the reader aware of each suspect thought or deed.
This won't be for everyone, but it is a lovely literary read if you enjoy words and the work it takes to string them together. You have to be in the mood for this book-to get lost in the details. There is beauty and horror between the covers of this novel. It's not often you find a book so steeped in nuance anymore and if you enjoy words and literature, you may like this-especially if WW1 history is one of your interests. I did enjoy this book but at times I wasn't patient enough for it-it depended on my mood when I was reading it. This is a slow walk through the past and through a time when young men came back butchered or not at all in a harsh war that affected people no matter where they lived in Europe. Erwin Mortier writes with a keen sensitivity that one may relish if the love of language and history is present.
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