The Bells of Bruges

by Georges Rodenbach

  Borluut recovered, climbed towards the act. It was no longer the rope that was helping him; it seemed as if he were pulling the rope, carrying it to the top.

  He reached the glass chamber, glancing vaguely at the keys, motionless as if they were dead, and at the tiny clock fixed to the wall, making the noise of its humble, regular life in time with the huge clock-face outside. Had he been anything in the tower other than that little beat of a human pulse? He hardly looked. His eyes were already elsewhere.

  He had just had a sudden inspiration, at last finding the details of the ‘act’, which he had not wanted to envisage in advance, counting on the last minute. It came when he thought of the bells, the great bells he wanted to see again, to call by their names in their dormitories, caress with a farewell hand, the bells that had been his grave friends, the trusty tombs of his sorrows, a sure source of consolation.

  What if one of them were now to be the tomb of his body? Yes! He would choose one of the huge bells; they have a ring inside, right at the top, to which the clapper is attached. That was where he would tie the rope, a very short piece so that he would disappear completely in the dark abyss where no one would find him for a long time, perhaps never. What joy to end deep inside one of the bells he loved so much!

  Which one would he choose? The great bells were on the top floor, on the platform reached by the final few stairs, only thirteen.

  As he was about to start his climb he thought of the unlucky number; this time he did not hesitate, but resolutely set out on the number that guards death. He was in a hurry. The great bells appeared, towering over him, eternally restless. An incessant quivering filled the room with reverberation. Borluut saw the Bell of Lust again. He looked on it as his examination of conscience. It had been the sin of the bells and the sin of his life. Listening to it had made him lose his way. He had yielded to the temptation of the flesh, fallen into the trap that is woman. He had loved bodies instead of loving the town alone.

  Having betrayed his ideal meant he would not see its fulfilment in the moment of death. He recalled van Hulle’s ecstatic end:

  ‘They have chimed!’ He would not see the beauty of Bruges made reality since he had not devoted himself to it exclusively. It was the fault of the obscene bell, which continued to obsess him.

  At that very moment it was calling out to him. It was trying to tempt him once more, and to the worst sin: the rope was like a lover, with it even death became a sensual delight, so let him die within its bronze dress, mingling with the ancient orgy…

  Horrified, Borluut turned away.

  A little farther along the venerable bell that rings out the hours presented itself, immense, dark, a silent abyss which would swallow him up entirely. He sensed that that was his goal and hastened his preparations, calm, thinking of God, meticulous and swift, his own executioner.

  And he went under the bell like the flame under the candle-snuffer.

  On that day and all the following days the carillon sounded, the hymns and the hours started up again, played by a mechanism, the aerial concert took flight, wreathing its garland of melancholy round noble souls, the ancient gables, the white necks of the swans, without anyone in the ungrateful town sensing that henceforward there was – a soul in the bells.

  Recommended Reading

  If you enjoyed reading The Bells of Bruges and would like to read another book by Georges Rodenbach we have published Bruges-la-Morte and in 2009 we will publish a collection of his short stories.

  There are other books on our list which should appeal to you if you like the books by Georges Rodenbach: Là-Bas – J.-K. Huysmans

  Parisian Sketches – J.-K. Huysmans

  Marthe – J.-K. Huysmans The Cathedral – J.-K. Huysmans

  En Route – J.-K. Huysmans

  The Oblate – J.-K. Huysmans

  Lucio’s Confession – Mario de Sa-Carneiro The Golem – Gustav Meyrink

  The Prussian Bride –Yuri Buida

  Paris Noir – Jacques Yonnet

  These can be bought from your local bookshop or online from amazon.co.uk or direct from Dedalus. Please write to Cash Sales, Dedalus Limited, 24–26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

  . For further details of the Dedalus list please go to our website www.dedalusbooks.com or write to us for a catalogue Bruges-la-Morte – Georges Rodenbach

  ‘Dedalus should be treasured: a small independent publisher that regularly produces works of European genius at which the behemoths wouldn’t sniff. If the corporations did care to look at this new work, they would find, on the surface, a precursor to W

  G Sebald, a Symbolist vision of the city that lays the way for Aragon and Joyce, and a macabre story of obsessive love and transfiguring horror that is midway between Robert Browning and Tod Browning. Bruges, “an amalgam of greyish drowsiness”, is the setting and spur; Hugues is a widower who finds a dancer nearly identical to his lost love. “Nearly” is here the operative word.

  This is a little masterpiece, from a brave publisher.’

  Stuart Kelly in Scotland on Sunday

  ‘A widower of five years, Hugues wanders Bruges in mourning.

  Heavy with a spectral misery, Rodenbach’s symbolist novel, first published in France in 1892, is a compelling albeit flawed work.

  As Alan Hollinghurst remarks in his introduction, it is a novel

  “by turns crude and subtle”, but although not a classic, it is also significantly more than a curiosity. There is an opiatic quality to the writing which at its best hovers on poetry’s border. Hugues’s relationship with the dancer who closely resembles his dead wife provides the plot, but the book’s real heart lies in the descriptions of Bruges itself, and its “amalgam of greyish drowsiness”.’

  Chris Power in The Times

  ‘In this Symbolist work, mirrors and metaphors take on a special significance. Rodenbach makes a case for the “indefinable power”

  of resemblance, appealing to the two contradictory needs of human

  nature: habit and novelty’. Metaphor – like translation, it might be said – endows old worlds with new life. Resemblance is revealed to be a life, however, just as words are lies, merely metaphors for the concepts they represent. The only assured resemblance Rodenbach can foresee is death, and accordingly the fear of death pervades the novel, deepened by the many reflecting surfaces.

  Daniel Starza-Smith in The Times Literary Supplement

  £6.99 ISBN 978 1 903517 23 9 166p B. Format Là-Bas – J.-K. Huysmans

  ‘As with most of Huysmans’ books, the pleasure in reading is not necessarily from its overarching plot-line, but in set pieces, such as the extraordinary sequences in which Gilles de Rais wanders through a wood that suddenly metamorphoses into a series of copulating organic forms, the justly famous word-painting of Matthias Grunewald’s Crucifixion altar-piece, or the brutally erotic scenes, crackling with sexual tension, between Durtal and Madame Chantelouve. If it is about anything, Là-Bas is about Good and Evil. This enlightening new translation will be especially useful to students of literature.’

  Beryl Bainbridge in The Spectator

  ‘The protagonist, Durtal, is investigating the life of Gilles de Rais, mass-murderer and unlikely – or not so unlikely –

  companion-in-arms of Joan of Arc. Long meditation on the nature of art, guilt, the satanic and the divine take him to a black mass. This superb new translation by Brendan King vividly recalls the allusive, proto-expressionist vigour of the original; images snarl and spring at the reader.’

  Murrough O’Brien in The Independent on Sunday

  ‘The classic tale of satanism and sexual obsession in nineteenth-century Paris, in an attractive new edition. Strong meat for diseased imaginations.’

  Time Out

  ‘Sex, satanism and alchemy are the themes of this cult curio, which understandably caused shock waves in the Parisian literary world when it was first published in 1891. Its antihero Durtal, is researching a book on the 15th-century child murderer Gilles de
Rais. Soon enough, his studies lead him to all sorts of unspeakable deeds and occults rituals. This Gothic shocker is not for the faint-hearted.’

  Jerome Boyd Maunsell in The Times

  £8.99 ISBN 978 1 873982 74 7 294p B. Format

  Parisian Sketches – J.-K. Huysmans

  ‘No one, not even Toulouse-Lautrec, was so tireless a tracker of Paris’s genius loci as Huysmans. Like many of his radical contemporaries, he was obsessed by the idea of beauty within the ugliness of back-street Paris, by the thought that the distortions of depravity presented a truer picture of our spiritual nature than conventional religion or revolutionary excess. The excellent introduction to these cameos show how Huysmans saw his art as complementary to the painter’s.’

  Murrough O’Brien in The Independent on Sunday

  ‘First published in the 1880s, this collection of atmospheric journalism reveals the great decadent (“nature is only interesting when sick and distressed”) moving from a broadly naturalistic, almost Dickensian style; as in a 1879 account of the Folies Bergere; to the heightened subjectivity of “

  Nightmare”, inspired by Odilon Redon: “blurred infusoria, vague flagellates, bizarre protoplasms”. An enthusiastic flaneur (if that’s not too much of a contradiction). Huysmans created evocative prose-pictures of Parisian life; a visit to the barber, a gloomy railway café, a chestnut-seller; that merit comparison with the pictures of Caillebotte, Degas and Atget.’

  Christopher Hirst in the Independent

  ‘There’s a vicious little piece about the Poplar Inn by the blighted river Bievre, which Huysmans conned himself would be a theatre-set-like homely hostelry with tart local wine, and was of course a mouldering dump dispensing big-brewery donkey-piss.

  Huysmans was a genuine flaneur – no posing and no lounging, he was up and out every day filling notebooks with info we wouldn’t otherwise now know about, such as the varied erotic odours of the female armpit before the invention of antiperspirant.’

  VR in the Guardian

  £6.99 ISBN 978 1 903517 47 5 196p B. Format Marthe – J.-K. Huysmans

  ‘Huysmans was part of Zola’s coterie of naturalist writers driven by a desire to break from the dominance of romantic fiction.

  Certainly this tale set in a brothel, his debut novel banned at publication in his native France in 1876, would be fertile ground for such a venture. The translation, its first in 50 years, is wonderfully bawdy and a fine tribute to a great work.’

  The Herald

  ‘Originally published in 1876, this is a translation of the pioneering French classic. Marthe became Huysmans’ landmark novel, culminating a Parisian demimonde setting with the

  portrayal of a would-be-actress, turned prostitute. Unique in its day as one of the earliest to deal with the theme of sex in exchange for money. Prepare to be led into some of the lowest dens and dives in the whole of Paris to be told the tale of Marthe and her brief relationship, ultimately doomed from the start.’

  Buzz Magazine

  ‘Flitting from brothel to theatre to kept mistress, with the threat of utter destitution never lifting. Marthe’s sad existence crushes her natural spirits into apathy. Brendan King’s slangy translation does bring out the vivid, earthy language of the 19th-century demimonde.’

  Scotland on Sunday

  ‘It is a tragic novel, and sorrowful in part, as one would expect of a prostitute’s tale in the nineteenth century and includes infant mortality, starvation, and poverty. However, Huysmans’s beautiful portrayal of Marthe, a young woman of the night, is both sympathetic, and incredibly modern. The wonderful way in which he writes eclipses the traditional boudoir scenes of the era. One can almost touch the wallpaper, smell the musk of body sweat and alcohol, and lives the lives of those complex and very colourful characters.’

  Jan Birks in The Erotic Review

  £6.99 ISBN 978 1 903517 47 5 149p B. Format Paris Noir – Jacques Yonnet

  ‘Concentrating on the seedy area around Rue Mouffetard, Yonnet reveals the dark side of the City of Light in the 1940s in this

  “secret history of a city”. The street life of the Left Bank ticks on much as normal during the Occupation, though Léopoldie the tart stops turning tricks because “the green German uniform does not suit her complexion”. Keep-on-Dancin’, the killer with a fondness for history, rules the roost. Though describing himself as “sceptical, disillusioned, cynical”, Yonnet casually dispatches a traitor in the Resistance. This is film noir in book form.’

  Christopher Hirst in The Independent

  ‘Yonnet evokes a wonderful and frightening world that lurks in the dark interstices of the City of Light: beggars, whores and poets, people who are quick to draw a knife or cast a spell, and are completely foreign to notions of ‘responsible’ drinking and sexual behaviour. The Old Man Who Appears After Midnight, Tricksy-Pierrot, the Watchmaker of Backward-Running Time and many others haunt a warren of streets and stews where supernatural events are frequent: a vicious one-eyed ginger tom is

  reincarnated as a murderous lover; a gypsy curse putrefies a hostile hostelry.

  What makes Yonnet’s memoir so special is the way the real and fantastic meet. The secrets of Paris play a role in the struggle against the Germans and their collaborators. Thus, the occultist spiv Keep-on-Dancin’ initiates Yonnet to a “psychic circuit” that enables him to unmask a Gestapo informer in “the room where only the truth can be told”.

  Yonnet portrays Paris as a character in her own right: the city is “edgy”, the Seine “sulks”. The geography determines the behaviour of its inhabitants, and will live on after their deaths. Certain névralgique points in the city incite Parisians to raise barricades, be it during revolutions or the Liberation of 1944. But, like François Villon and Charles Baudelaire, Yonnet conveys the fragility of things.’

  Gavin Bond in Scotland on Sunday

  £9.99 ISBN 978 1 903517 48 2 280p B. Format The Prussian Bride – Yuri Buida

  ‘The Kaliningrad region is in an odd geographical and historical situation. The region itself is only recently Russian – it was once East Prussia and its Russian inhabitants replaced the indigenous German population after the Second World War. Yuri Buida’s magnificent collection of stories about his home town reflects these anomalies and presents a powerful and hilarious meditation on dislocated identities. Everything here is transformed, but only to give a greater force to the depiction of human suffering and joys. The whole effect is of a people’s imagination confined by historical and geographical forces bursting forth in Rabelaisian splendour, without losing the stoicism that enabled them to endure the hardships of Communism.

  The stories show an ironic awareness of the power and dangers of self-deception, while seeing it as the only way of living a coherent life.

  Buida’s earlier novel, Zero Train (2001), was also powerful, but the theme of history’s power to fragment ordinary lives works better in short-story format than in a continuous narrative. As we read through the stories in The Prussian Bride , we get a Brueghel-like picture of a community held together by ragged threads. The families in these stories are disjointed, cobbled together from casually adopted orphans and catatonic or otherwise absent wives and husbands. As in Zero Train , there is a sustained engagement with the absurd fantasies of self-empowerment that men construct to cope with their political impotence, but there is also more obvious engagement here with a range of women’s characters, some suffering silently, others taking control of life and their appetites.

  The form of the stories is wonderfully varied, and the different registers are brilliantly captured by the translator, Oliver Ready. Perhaps the most effective are the longer ones such as

  “Rita Schmidt Whoever”. Yet here, as in some of the more lyrical miniature stories, it is the casual references to the town’s life, often fuelled by a delighted cloacal fascination, that gives the collection its particular character.’

  Tom MacFaul in The Times Literary Supplement

  £9.99 ISBN 978 1 903517 06
2 363p B. Format The Golem – Gustav Meyrink

  ‘A superbly atmospheric story set in the old Prague ghetto featuring the Golem, a kind of rabbinical Frankenstein monster, which manifests every 33 years in a room without a door. Stranger still, it seems to have the same face as the narrator. Made into a film in 1920, this extraordinary book combines the uncanny psychology of doppelganger stories with expressionism and more than a little melodrama; Meyrink’s old Prague, like Dickens’s London is one of the great creation of city writing, an eerie, claustrophobic and fantastical underworld where anything can happen.’

  Phil Baker in The Sunday Times

  ‘This is a fever of a book. An hallucination, a wild writer’s improvisation on an old Jewish fairy tale. The Golem reveals its secrets in the lives of murderers and thieves, not seers. Its sufferings are not devilish torments, but bitter sex games played in the shadows of Ghetto corridors. There is no sweetness in the low-life, no salvation in a condemned man’s understanding. There is not a letter of sentimentality in The Golem . For an esoteric classic Meyrink’s novel is short on mysticism and long on materialism. It does for Prague what Joyce did for Dublin and Bely for St. Petersburg.’

  Phil Smith in Venue

  ‘The book is profoundly unsettling, shifting from dream to wakefulness. Pernath, the amnesiac, is searching for the key to his past, looking for the door to his memories. The ghetto is a winding cityscape populated by extraordinary characters, many of which have their own secrets which Pernath attempts to untangle.

  The novel reminds of the London of Dickens’s darker novels, as well as Kafka.’

  Sarah Singleton in The Third Alternative

  £6.99 ISBN 978 1 873982 91 4 262p B. Format COPYRIGHT

  Published in the UK by Dedalus Limited, 24-26, St Judith’s Lane, Sawtry, Cambs, PE28 5XE

  email: info@dedalusbooks.com

  www.dedalusbooks.com

  ISBN printed book 978 1 903517 54 3

  ISBN e-book 978 1 909232 05 1

  Dedalus is distributed in the USA & Canada by SCB Distributors, 15608 South New Century Drive, Gardena, CA 90248