The personification which he weaves in works fabulously: ‘Behind the hedge of a spire of roof tiles slumped between two gables’, ‘the fluorescent green face glowed spectrally in the dark’, a coffee service ‘shivers’ and heels ‘beat a nervous tattoo’ on the floor. It feels as though nothing phases him, and he is simultaneously troubled by and comfortable within his often bleak surroundings.įrom the very beginning, I was struck by the way in which Mortier sets scenes. His first person perspective is both odd and rather beguiling of a trip to a grey churchyard at the beginning of the story, for example, he says: ‘I was taken there once a year by the grandmother… It was less than five turnings between the garden gate and the place where her dead lay sleeping’. He is referred to, quite a way through the book, as ‘a dreamer’, and as such he has a fresh and rather peculiar manner of viewing the world: ‘her toes lay like a row of bosoms in a black leather corset’, he tells us. This further reinforces the notion that he is a detached observer. Many of the scenes within the novella feature, either wholly or in part, the narrator’s grandmother he refers to her throughout as ‘the grandmother’, as though she is nothing to do with him.
The Marcel of the novel’s title is his grandmother’s youngest brother the young narrator takes it upon himself to discover what happened to him, his death deemed, as it was, ‘mysterious’. He is always on the periphery, always watching those around him. The narrator of Marcel is a ten-year-old boy who appears as a spectral, almost two-dimensional figure throughout, despite his place within the story. First published in Holland in 2001, and the recipient of several literary prizes, the coming-of-age novella has now been translated into English for the first time by Ina Rilke. Marcel is acclaimed Dutch author Erwin Mortier’s debut work.
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