Tom Lanoye

Biography

Tom Lanoye (b. 1958) usually pulls no punches when it comes to criticizing his fellow countrymen, and his reputation as an enfant terrible extends to the literary world as well. Besides the collections of his newspaper columns, Lanoye has also published reviews, stories, poetry, novels and plays. In an interview, Tom Lanoye once perfectly summed up the ambiguity of his attitude towards his place of birth: ‘Flanders fills me with great abhorrence and admiration: I write about the banal and sublime things I encounter here.’ This paradox is reflected in the title of Lanoye’s novel Het goddelijke monster (The Divine Monster). The country is a divine monster with many faces, as is the main character in the novel. Lanoye’s characteristic exaggeration makes perfect material for the theatre readings which have helped establish his reputation beyond the borders of his native Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany. The performer and satirist has proved that he can be serious as well: Ten oorlog (To War), his adaptation of Shakespeare’s historical plays, was published in Germany and was staged at the Salzburger Festspiele. Lanoye’s rhymed translation has been acclaimed as ‘the measure for all forthcoming Shakespeare adaptations’.

Titles

The Divine Monster

(Het goddelijke monster, 1997)

In an interview Tom Lanoye once perfectly summed up the ambiguity of his attitude to the place of his birth: ‘Flanders fills me with great abhorrence and admiration: I write about the banal and sublime things I encounter here’. This paradox is reflected in the title of Lanoye’s latest novel: Het goddelijke monster. For Tom Lanoye, political wrongs and corruption function as a metaphor for human weakness, and in his work that weakness is called Belgium. The country is a ‘divine monster’ with many faces and the same can be said of the main character of Lanoye’s latest novel. Continued...

Black Tears

(Zwarte tranen, 1999)

Zwarte tranen is the second novel in a cycle which began with Lanoye’s Het goddelijke monster (1997). We don’t know yet how many more will follow, but whoever reads Zwarte tranen will eagerly look forward to the next, largely because of the soap-like nature of the family dramas involved, set against the background of the scandals which have plagued Belgium for the last few years. As a columnist, Lanoye has always made his opinions abundantly clear, and he frequently takes upon himself the role of the intellectual conscience of Belgium. In this book Lanoye the columnist, the literary performer (with stress on fun in literature), the playwright (his magnificent Shakespeare rendering Ten oorlog) and the poet combine in an epic which also tells a more personal tale. Continued...

Evil Tongues

(Boze tongen, 2002)

Tom Lanoye (born 1958) published the first part of an ambitious trilogy in 1997 Het goddelijke monster (The Divine Monster), aimed at establishing his reputation as a novelist besides the renown he already enjoyed as a columnist and playwright. In much the same way as Hugo Claus projected wartime and post-war Belgium in Het verdriet van België (The Sorrow of Belgium, 1983) and Walter van den Broeck described the country for the benefit of King Boudewijn in Het beleg van Laken (1985-1992), Tom Lanoye has charted Belgium in the nineties. Continued...

The Third Marriage

(Het derde huwelijk, 2006)

‘And what isn’t useful, simply disappears. No questions asked.’ Het derde huwelijk (The Third Marriage), Tom Lanoye’s sixth novel, opens with this hard truth; hard because Maarten Seebregs, the main character, is not a ‘useful’ person. Continued...