Walter van den Broeck
The Auctioneer (De veilingmeester)
Full of unexpected twists
One striking factor of Walter van den Broeck is that he often appears as a character in his own novels. In his latest, De veilingmeester (The Auctioneer), he shows his lighter side, being visited by Bo van Dorselaer who asks him to write about his crazy and incredible story.
Bo van Dorselaer is an auctioneer asked to sell the contents of a house by a young woman to whom he is immediately attracted.
Inside the house he finds three hundred copies of The Heiress, written by the unknown Walda van den Brogel; they contain a code, the key to a great secret. In his dogged pursuit of the remaining copies that were printed Bo forces up the price, but he is prepared to risk his business, and even his marriage for the secret. The dénouement is stunning: the young woman, with whom Bo has fathered a child, is the natural daughter of the supposedly childless King Baudouin of Belgium.
What does a writer do with a story like that? As is often the case, Van den Broeck plays ironically with reality, using references to his earlier work, revelations about the Belgian royal family and pure fiction, to create a popular bibliographic thriller. In exposing both the technique and impact of novels, Van den Broeck subtly criticises the craft of writing. De veilingmeester is a clever, compelling novel, full of unexpected twists that show the fun that the author had in writing it.
Publisher
De Bezige Bij
Van Miereveldstraat 1
NL - 1071 DW Amsterdam
TEL. +31 20 305 98 10
FAX +31 20 305 98 24
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.debezigebij.nl
Publishing details
De veilingmeester (2007, 367 pp)
Biography
Walter van den Broeck was born in 1941 into a working class neighbourhood near the metalworks in Olen in Flemish Kempen. In his theatre plays and novels, often inspired by his own family life as a child, he shows great concern for the social circumstances of the workers, and highlights their living conditions. His 1967 debut, De troonopvolger (The Heiress), was a Freudian novel about a young writer wanting to escape his fathers authority. Van den Broeck’s breakthrough came with Brief aan Boudewijn (Letter to Baudouin, 1980), in which he shows the Belgian king round the working class area and house in which he grew up. The author’s fictional counter visit to the royal palace in Laken (Brussels) evolved into Van den Broeck’s masterpiece Het beleg van Laken (The Siege of Laken, published in four parts from 1985, collected in 1999). The personal theme recurs in novels like Verdwaalde post (Lost Mail, 1998), Een lichtgevoelige jongen (A Sensitive Boy, 2001) and De beiaard en de dove man (The Carilloneur and the Deaf Man, 2004).
Quotes
Van den Broeck continues to come up with original, glittering stories with the structure of reinforced concrete.
VTM