Louis Paul Boon, the Favourite¶
Of the three writers your Ghent curriculum handed you — Mulisch, Hermans, Boon — you have already told your own notes which one wins. Boon is the favourite. Not the most celebrated of the three outside Flanders, not the one most likely to turn up on a European literature syllabus in translation, but the one you keep. De Kapellekensbaan and Het Geuzenboek are the two works your notes name as the load-bearing ones, and it's worth asking what they're doing that Mulisch's cathedral and Hermans' cold machine aren't.
The politics were anarchist. Close enough.¶
Your own phrase for Boon's politics is exact and worth sitting with: anarchist, "close enough." Not Marxist, not disciplined, not a party man — Boon spent his life adjacent to organised left politics without ever fully joining its institutions, a working printer and journalist who wrote for socialist and communist papers at different points and never quite settled into either. For a reader who is a card-carrying Marxist, whose politics run through parties and programmes and the RCI's disciplined internationalism, "close enough" is a small but telling concession. It says: this isn't my tendency, but it's recognisably on my side of the argument. Boon's anarchism is not liberal humanism dressed up as radicalism — the kind of vague progressive sentiment that Dutch and Flemish literature is otherwise full of. It's a genuine hostility to power, hierarchy, and the pieties of both church and state, expressed by a man who lived it rather than toured it. You don't need Boon to be a Marxist to recognise the same enemy in his sights.
That matters for why he outranks Mulisch and Hermans in your own ranking. Mulisch's politics, such as they are, run through a kind of grand, almost theological humanism — he wanted to write the century, not fight it. Hermans' politics are closer to a shrug dressed as philosophy: everything is contingent, nothing can be known for certain, so why bother. Boon is the only one of the three who wrote like the world was actually at stake, and like injustice was a fact to be named rather than a mood to be evoked. If your taste elsewhere rewards work that "means it" — sincerity of purpose over persona, conviction over pose — Boon is the writer among the three who never once postures.
There's a further point worth making about why "close enough" is the right verdict rather than a hedge. Anarchism and Marxism have spent a century and a half arguing about the state, about organisation, about whether the revolution needs a party or a spontaneous uprising of the base — a real and consequential disagreement, not a rounding error. But set against the actual texture of mid-century Flemish literature, most of which either avoided politics altogether or wrapped itself in a comfortable Catholic or liberal humanism, the distance between an anarchist and a Marxist reader is trivial next to the distance between either of them and the writers who wrote as if class simply wasn't the engine of the century. Boon's anarchism puts him on the correct side of that much larger division, even if he'd never have taken instruction from a party congress.
The Geuzenboek as a door, not a destination¶
Het Geuzenboek is not just a novel you happen to admire. Your notes are explicit that it functions as the literary entry point into a genuinely long-running intellectual obsession: the Dutch Revolt, the sixteenth-century uprising of the Low Countries against Spanish Habsburg rule, which has since become a pet topic serious enough to have produced a stalled fifteen-thousand-word draft article aimed at a Marxist audience. That lineage matters. Boon built Het Geuzenboek on John Lothrop Motley's nineteenth-century history of the revolt — a Romantic, moralised, distinctly Protestant-heroic account of Dutch liberty triumphing over Spanish tyranny — and then did something Motley never could: he made it literature rather than epic. Where Motley marches you through battles and beheadings with the confidence of a Victorian who already knows how the story ends and whose side God was on, Boon fractures the material, refuses you the comfort of a single authoritative narrator, and lets the sixteenth century bleed into the twentieth on the page.
This is worth dwelling on because it explains something about how you actually read history. You didn't arrive at the Dutch Revolt through a textbook. You arrived through a novel that itself arrived through a nineteenth-century historian's romance. The chain is Motley to Boon to you — three layers of retelling before the "obsession" even had a name. That's not a weakness in your relationship to the period; it's evidence that your engagement with history has always run through narrative and form rather than through the flat transmission of fact, which is exactly the sensibility that produces a fifteen-thousand-word draft with strong narrative sections and a stuck editorial problem, rather than a tidy summary.
It also explains something about which parts of that draft are strongest. Your own editorial notes single out the Iconoclasm of 1566 and the Committees of Eighteen as the most original material in the piece — precisely the moments where ordinary people, mobs and civic militias and Calvinist congregations, take the story out of the hands of princes and nobles for a while. That's Boon's instinct as much as it is sound historiography: the same distrust of great men and comfortable authority that made him fracture the well-made novel is what makes you reach, in your own writing, for the moments where the Revolt was driven from below rather than negotiated from above.
The collage method, and what got lost¶
De Kapellekensbaan is the more radical of the two books formally, and it's worth being precise about what Boon actually does in it, because the technique is the argument. The novel does not tell one story. It interleaves a nineteenth-century narrative — the life of Ondine, a girl from a poor Flemish town coming of age against industrialisation — with a present-day frame in which a group of writers and hangers-on sit around debating how the very novel you're reading should be written, arguing about politics, art, and each other while the "real" story unfolds in fragments around them. Boon breaks the fourth wall not as a postmodern trick played for its own cleverness but because he genuinely didn't trust the smoothness of the traditional novel to carry the weight of what he wanted to say about class, industrial capitalism, and the corruption of ideals. The commentary track and the story track argue with each other on the page. Nothing is allowed to settle into a single, authoritative voice.
That refusal to settle is the thing modern literary fiction mostly gave up once it professionalised. Boon wrote as an outsider to the literary establishment — a house painter and factory-town journalist, self-taught, publishing in the socialist and communist press before anyone thought of him as a novelist at all. The contemporary literary novel, by contrast, increasingly comes out of the same handful of institutions: creative writing programmes, festival circuits, prize committees, a professional class of writers trained to produce a recognisable, exportable smoothness. That smoothness is not nothing — craft is real, and plenty of professionalised fiction is very good. But it trades away exactly the raggedness that makes De Kapellekensbaan still feel dangerous seventy years on: the sense of a writer who hasn't been taught to sand off his own contradictions, who lets the seams show because the seams are where the argument lives. Boon's collage method isn't a style choice you can extract and imitate in a workshop. It's what a genuinely unaffiliated, self-made, politically furious writer does when the well-made novel feels like a lie about how history and class actually operate on a life.
Worth your consideration¶
If Het Geuzenboek is the door into the Dutch Revolt and De Kapellekensbaan is the door into Boon's method, the natural next move is a shorter one: Boon's own wartime novel, Mijn Kleine Oorlog ("My Little War"), written in the same fractured, collage-adjacent style but compressed into something closer to a hundred pages of occupied Flanders rather than a sprawling industrial century. It would tell you quickly whether what you love in the two big books is the scale and the history, or the method itself — and it's short enough to read in the same kind of quiet, deliberate stretch you're currently giving to Judt.