Tom Lanoye
Speechless (Sprakeloos)
A new highlight in Lanoye’s oeuvre
Tom Lanoye’s successful and well- received novel, Sprakeloos (Speechless), tells the story of the life and death of the author’s parents, particularly his mother’s. It starts with an appealing lament about the effort it took him to write about them, questioning his methods and the result. The main theme of the story that follows is the final years of his mother’s life.
After a thrombosis, she suffers aphasia and behavioural problems and never recovers sufficiently to be able to live at home. New attacks make her entirely dependent on help. Her son, the author, is deeply touched by her loss of speech, which – as an amateur actress – had been so dear to her, and his impotent anger at this from time to time makes his story a ‘song of curses’. In compensation – and as a grateful and moving homage – he reconstructs her life in the abundance of language that used to be hers. José, as the mother was called, is depicted as a flamboyant, domineering and controlling woman who, investing great effort in her family and their butcher’s shop, always strove for everyone’s respectability, reputation and well-being, resorting, from time to time, to dramatic scenes and shrewd manipulation to get her way.
Among her most difficult experiences were, according to Lanoye, the fatal car accident that killed her one ‘difficult’ son, and the disclosure that her youngest son, the author, is homosexual. Lanoye tells of the ups and downs of family life in a good-natured, sometimes humorous fashion. The description of his mother’s decline and death is, however, incredibly moving.
This is an ‘unadorned account’, an informal, honest testimony of a mother by her son, in which much is in what is not mentioned: good nature, gratitude, endearment, closeness. At the same time, Lanoye reflects on the actual function of writing and the vital importance of language in these circumstances. In a wider context, Sprakeloos is about a personal experience recognisable to everyone, woven into a lively fresco of a generation, a period, a life style, with astonishing brush strokes of la flandre profonde, masterful in its popular realism and the richness of its language.
Publisher
Prometheus
Herengracht 540
NL - 1017 CG Amsterdam
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FAX +31 20 622 54 61
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.pbo.nl
Publishing details
Sprakeloos (2009, 359 pp)
Biography
Tom Lanoye (b. 1958) is one of the most popular and well regarded Flemish authors. He started out as a poet and a critic, but became famous with his prose, drama, politically and socially engaged columns and his performances. Abroad, particularly in Germany, he is highly regarded as a script writer. His debut as a fiction writer was Een slagerszoon met een brilletje (A Butcher’s Son with Glasses). After Alles moet weg (Everything Must Go, 1988, filmed in 1996), he established his reputation once and for all with Kartonnen dozen (Cardboard Boxes, 1991), an autobiographical novel about becoming aware of his homosexuality. His most important work until now, about the eventful nineties in Belgium, which Flemish television turned into a ten part series, was the award-winning Monstertrilogie (Monster Trilogy, 1997-2002). Het derde huwelijk (The Third Marriage, 2006) was nominated for the Libris Literature Prize and the Gouden Uil.
Quotes
An exorcist ritual in text, the sometimes heart-rending account of an attempt to let go.
HP / De Tijd
Full of love and admiration, yet quivering like raw meat.
De Standaard
Speechless far transcends the purely biographical story of a mother. It has become the portrait of a generation, of family life in the sixties and seventies.
HP / De Tijd