M HKA Ensembles

Artist Novel, 20 x 12.5 cm, 335 p., language : Nederlands, publisher : Uitgeverij Kritak, Leuven, ISBN : 90-6303-509-8.

Collection: Collection M HKA, Antwerp (Inv. no. B 2030/854).

Literary synopsis

In the first instance, Dodemanskamer (Dead Man's Room) can be read as an epic story, like the story of an odyssey. The myth of that journey develops within a sliding fresco, the fiercely shimmering wallpaper of an era that had only just survived a world war. In the second instance, Dodemanskamer is the capture of a mythical Flanders – containing the brooding, black, hilarant, surreal looking souls of that shire – at the time of Boudewijn's first crown years. Anyone who digs deeper and ends up behind the picaresque narrative plot will be able to indulge in winks, references, quotations, 'worlds of literature' – because this novel is about writing, about the morality of the writing beast, 'the writer beast', about the stratification of language, the use of that stratification, the suggestive power and how the use of 'different languages ​​and styles' must be inextricably linked with the hundreds of thin veins into which the diversity of emotions is pumped. Furthermore, this novel has on all fronts to do with the quest, the Bildungsroman (albeit with rather counterproductive initiation rituals), the grotesque, with the number of visions of the fin-de-siècle, with apocalypticism, mysticism, longing, magic, paganism, devotion, allegory, brutal purity and (self) destruction. Ultimately, Dodemanskamer has everything to do with the time in which we live today and with the kabbalah of Pjeroo Roobjee's demons. It is not possible to explain this. Some secrets are from the grave and must stay there.