Rodenbach's Bruges la morte: Of Love for the Living Dead
Written: Jul 24 '08 (Updated Aug 12 '08)
Product Rating:
Pros: Intriguingly obsessed book that makes you ponder the hard moral questions in life.
Cons: It dwells in mourning, religion-imposed restrictions, and death (though not necessarily a depressing read).
The Bottom Line: Even grimness, sorrows, and death has their addictive side. Rodenbach explores it in ways that make you think about your priority in life. A good read.
smorg's Full Review: Georges Rodenbach - Bruges-la-Morte
Georges Rodenbach: Bruges la Morte
Georges Rodenbach was a 19th Century Belgian lawyer, novelist, and poet, in whose time the Flanders city of Bruges (Brugge) was a gloomy ghost of a metropolis that practically suffocated to death when the North Sea receded away from it, shifting the center of commerce to Antwerp to its south.
In this novel, the story of gloomy and stuck-in-time Bruges is also the story of Hughes Viane, the widower who refuses to move on with life even 5 years after the death of his wife (who is never named in the book). Rather, Hughes moves to dead Bruges looking to wallow in his remembrance of the happiness that he had lost. He insists on isolation, living by himself, aided by a loyal if prudishly religious maid, Barbe, who cooks and cleans for him. He shuns friendship, avoid anything, music included, that might improperly perk him up and make him feel ashamed for breaking his self-imposed extended mourning. His wife is dead, and it is death that he must love and pursue... The problem is, Hughes is also religious (though I wonder if he was spiritual...) and so can’t very well commit suicide (or he might just end up at a different place than where his beloved wife might be waiting to spend an eternity with him at).
If this seems self-deludingly complicated, Hughes’ dilemma experiences exponential growth when he chances upon a perfect double of his wife walking along the road one evening. Jane Scott resembles his dead wife to the last strand of her hair... and even has the same speaking voice. Perhaps our ‘hero’ would have done better had she been an apparition or just a figment of his imagination. Alas, she is a living woman with a mind of her own who just happens to look and talk just like Hughes’ wife did. So, naturally, that complicates things a bit. The courtship between the two take some really surreal turns that leads to a predictable and tragic ending.
The thing is, though... The predictability of the ending really doesn’t hurt the readability of this book at all. You don’t really read Bruges la morte to anticipate suspense. You read it, and continue to read it, because the morbid psychology, the fatalism, and even the oppressive atmosphere of it somehow mesmerize you. Rodenbach really captures the feel of the dead Bruges in his writing and seems to have a rather grim view of its future (the real Bruges did rally out of its bout of deadness, thanks very much to modern tourism... Rodenbach would be appalled!). The city really is a main character in the book that really preys heavily on Hughes... even though it doesn’t get to say a word. Reading it I wonder if it is the inhabitants who make the city this way, or if it is the other way around... Most likely it was a case of synergic symbiosis; like attracts like and their combination makes their 'likeness' even stronger (this can be a good combo unless the ‘like’ has to do with the love for mourning).
I have not read the book in its original French and so don’t really know how well Philip Mosley’s English translation matches up to it. I can say that this English translation produces a very fluid read, though. It boasts a very eloquent writing style capable of keeping even depression-resistant me reading this melodramatic wallowing in self-imposed sadness that the story really is. This book was turned into a play, The Mirror, by Rodenbach himself, and then into an opera, Die tote Stadt (The Dead City) by Erich Wolfgang Korngold... though the opera has a different ending than the book does.
See bits of the city that inspired the book, and hear the music that the book inspired...
http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=i2yBvyxiyz0 (Mariettas Lied from Korngold’s Die tote Stadt)
Do I recommend this book? Yeah, I do... It isn’t an uplifting read, but it makes you think about things... or about how you think about things like the value of life; what arbitrates it, who really has the right to dictate it... among other things. And it does that without preaching to you. That’s a major plus!
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