Louis Paul Boon - My Little War

There are a few novels, rare in any language or during any time period, which sweep the reader up with the controlled confidence of the writer's prose and force a re-examination of the very act of writing and reading, and in doing so inspire a new appreciation for the possibilities of the novel. At times, such as when James Joyce's Ulysses was published, these works explode like a bomb, scattering the accumulated debris of conventional literature and quite literally creating a time that was before, and after, their work. Often though, they fall somewhere off the beaten track, waiting to be discovered, and when they are, treasured and valued by their discoverers. Louis Paul Boon's My Little War is very much not one of these fallen-away authors in the Dutch-speaking world, where he is very well known, but for us readers in English he is a marvel, our own small explosion of possibility.

My Little War is a novel of a very big war, the Second World War, but Boon describes it as seen through the eyes of the middle and working class citizens of a small Belgian town under German occupation. From the very first page, Boon throws down the gauntlet to would-be “great writers”, wondering what “great writer will rise up now and present us with his Book About the Great War – with capital letters?” He admits that he himself is but a little writer, and thus has a little war to write about, but then muses that,

Perhaps you'll do it, you who've lost all your worldly goods, as they say, but who as a human being have lost much more, having been evacuated like so much livestock and deported like a criminal, bombed and machine-gunned and toyed with like an empty can being kicked around by a bunch of kids, who've died a hundred times over, mutilated gagged and teeth knocked out with a wrench, so that, sitting there like Job with his boils, you...

And on it goes. Boon recognises that a Great Book will be written about the war (for all Great Wars have their own Great Writers), but he has set himself both a more simple and more difficult task. For Boon, a war – and particularly World War II – is as much about the unknown and the down-trodden and the needlessly affected, as it is about the great figures marching through history with their medals and their proclamations. He holds these faraway figures in great contempt, and we soon discover that Boon's My Little War is an angry, outraged, disbelieving, unapologetic act of destruction against the deceit and conceits of serious writers who would cloud the truth of things through their pretty words and elaborate metaphors.

My Little War is split into thirty-one chapters, each then sliced in roughly half, the first a little story about this person or another – the woman who waits in line for bread, and dies waiting; the young girl with the amazing breasts which are so incredible that “when she walks round town she pokes everyone's eyes out with the things”; the electrician Antoon who repairs radios and has a fondness for taking pictures with his camer, though they never turn out well; and so on – and the second half which is italicised and seems to come directly from Boon himself, angry sections which explode with fury and anger and, just as often, humour:

and besides THE BOMBS ARE FALLING maybe she's already dead back there

BOOM

that was close!

The stories add up to a picture of an ordinary town in an extraordinary time, where a boy missing from school one day could as easily be exploded by a bomb as skipping out on his teachers to go exploring with his friends. Nobody really wants the war it seems, and there are as many pro- as anti-Germany about, and pro- and anti-Russian, and pro- and anti-Belgium, and – you get the idea. As the winds of war blows (oh, what a delightful turn of phrase for what would, in reality, involve the deaths of thousands and the destruction of all manner of buildings and material), so too the minds of men change. The townsfolk, though never a collective, support whomever seems to be winning, and when the Allies finally win, declare themselves as always having been part of the Resistance (while hastily hiding their Nazi paraphernalia, of course). Boon is particularly savage toward the rich, who really aren't all that affected because they remain able to buy, oh, food, and he is adamant in his unflinching description of the casual destruction that befalls people who really have nothing to do with the war at all:

And Roger's mother lives next to the fuel depot, which the English attack, but they don't hit the depot, they hit the terrace of the workers' house right next to it, and now one is dead and one is half-dead and the one who escaped as if by a miracle is standing there shouting: you can't make an omelet without breaking some eggs.

Boon describes the war and his townsfolk with a resolutely unliterary, almost anti-literary eye. He consciously distances himself from those aspects of serious culture and history which a “Great Writer” would address, choosing instead to focus on the popular, the vernacular of the people and the small desires and hopes of the poor. A bed-frame broken by marauding German soldiers means more to the man who would sleep in it later than night than the inspiring speeches of Churchill listened to over a crackling radio. Boon knows this, and is angry that the “Great Writers” forget, and that the rich and the powerful don't care.

And when the planes are overhead the rich people who are pro-Belgium say: why do they have to DROP BOMBS DROP BOMBS every night – but they keep their gates locked so that the workers trying to flee the factories or the train station don't run through their gardens and trample the grass.

On and on the war progresses, and children age and become accustomed to the constant instability of life – indeed, that becomes their form of stability – and someone who was alive yesterday is not today, and that is normal because it happens all the time. Prices rise and bellies go empty, but this is not a class novel, or at least, it is not in any customary sense. Boon is sympathetic to the poor and the weak, but he recognises their foibles and shines a spotlight on the craven and the thieves and the corrupt as often as he does the rich with their gated walls and tended gardens. Near the end of My Little War Boon shows his hand, writing,

If I've usually said “I” in this book, it was just a way of presenting things, what I really meant was “you” - you, you poor man, exploited, scorned, spat upon, pacified with empty promises, who didn't have the courage or were too stupid to stand up for yourself and who are laughing at me now and at this book because it shows you as you are and there's the occasional dirty word in it, ha ha

A constant throughout My Little War is laughter. At times Boon's laughter is outwardly directed, a kind of cackle at the grand absurdity of men with moustaches playing at being Important People. Other times, the laughter is inwardly focused, giggling and snorting at the way we cling to possessions, friends and familial ties when the V-1 rockets are falling and they can just as easily fall on me as on you, or them, or that nice fellow over there with the piano. Generally, the laughter is directed at us all, a disbelieving chuckle, the sort of laughter that comes unbidden because we aren't sure how else to react, when everything is so clearly wrong, but nobody seems able to stand up and say – but what about what is right? And those that do shit their pants with fear as they are mowed down by the machine guns in the trenches, exploded by the roadside bombs hidden among the rubble of buildings blown up months earlier, garroted by the razor-wire spread invisibly between trees.

Louis Paul Boon's novel ultimately examines the futility, absurdity, and comic hilarity of war and the destruction that inevitably falls upon the heads of those who don't make the decisions and don't know the reasons. Suffering comes one way or another, be it through war taxes, or rationed food, or death, or a son lost to the war, or a daughter raped, or a mother raped, or a grandmother raped, or a child's brains dashed against the wall of the kitchen, or – but we can't all get angry about war now, can we? Let's laugh. There's nothing else left to do.

Author	Louis Paul Boon
Title	My Little War (Original Title: Mijn kleine oorlog)
Translator	Paul Vincent
Nationality	Belgian (Flemish)
Publisher	The Dalkey Archive Press
Published	2010 (English) 1947; 1960 (Flemish)
Pages	125
Availability: ---Amazon (US)

See Also

List of titles by The Dalkey Archive Press under review