Featured Interview With Bob Van Laerhoven
Tell us a little about yourself. Where were you raised? Where do you live now?
I am the son of Flemish working-class parents. I was raised in a small Flemish village near to the Dutch border. (Flanders is the northern part of Belgium.)Now, I’m living in a cozy village near to the city of Ghent, famous for its historical places. Pets? Don’t get me started! My wife is a hippo therapist and we have four horses, our “darlings”, our beloved ones, our “spoiled madams.” I’m the caretaker of our beautiful horses. They have the freedom to roam over our domain (sand arena’s, paddocks, racetrack and a big prairie with open stables). A therapy horse must be happy, relaxed and loved. Only then it’ll show that remarkable, almost mythic capacity to “mirror” people. It’s very touching to see how physically and mentally challenged people brisk up when they are with these noble beings whose wisdom is different than ours, but definitely there.
At what age did you realize your fascination with books? When did you start writing?
Although there were no books in the house – we were poor people -, I felt the need to read very early and I was lucky to have a small but well managed library in our village with a librarian who took gratification in helping me to find new authors and titles. At fifteen I wanted to write a story that was set during WWII but I didn’t finish my endeavor. It took me another ten years to write my first story which was published in a Flemish paper. I am a self-made author. Nothing in my upbringing or my education had prepared me to become a fulltime writer in a small language community like Flanders (only five million people). But…Here I am, being a fulltime author for the 24th year now, having published more than 30 books in Holland and Belgium, and being translated and published in French and English. It’s the dream of a shy youth in a backward region of rural Flanders, a boy who barely finished college and was destined to become a postman…
Who are your favorite authors to read? What is your favorite genre to read. Who Inspires you in your writings?
I like the great 19th-century stylists like Flaubert, Baudelaire, André Baillon, but also John Cheever’s fantastic diaries, the musings of the Catalan writer Josep Pla, the gorgeous prose of Graciliano Ramos, the refined decadence of the Italian writer Curzio Malaparte…In short: stylish writers. In Flanders, I am – for the moment – the only representative of the “cross-over” between literature and the suspense novel. I like to mix literature and suspense, which is a very difficult thing to do.
Tell us a little about your latest book?
Well, it isn’t exactly my latest: with the original novel “De wraak van Baudelaire” (written in Dutch), I won the Hercule Poirot Prize for best suspense novel of the year in 2007, after an intense fulltime writing period of a bit more than a year. In 2014 the English translation “Baudelaire”s Revenge” was published in hardcover in the US by Pegasus Books, after the success of the French translation (La Vengeance de Baudelaire) in France and Canada.
Very recently, “Baudelaire’s Revenge” made me also the winner of the USA Best Book Award 2014 in the category: Fiction: Mystery/suspense.
This historical novel is set in Paris in 1870. As the social and political turbulence of the Franco-Prussian War roils the city, workers starve to death while aristocrats seek refuge in orgies and séances. The Parisians are trapped like rats in their beautiful city but a series of gruesome murders captures their fascination and distracts them from the realities of war. The killer leaves lines from the recently deceased Charles Baudelaire’s controversial anthology “Les Fleurs du Mal” on each corpse, written in the poet’s exact handwriting. Commissioner Lefèvre, a lover of poetry and a veteran of the Algerian war, is on the case, and his investigation is a journey into the sinister side of human nature. The plot appears to extend as far as the court of the Emperor Napoleon III. This historical crime novel offers up some shocking revelations about sexual mores in 19th century France and illuminates the shadow life of one of the greatest names in poetry.
Now, since April of this year, when “Baudelaire’s Revenge” was launched, I noticed that the novel can be shocking to American readers (much less so in Europe).
The great French poet Charles Baudelaire adhered to the “Decadents”, a group of artists who – in an era wherein individuality began to blossom for the first time – wanted to overstep “every boundary” of the “civil society”: drugs (opium, laudanum, the “green faerie” absinth), sex (Paris at that time hosted more brothels than restaurants and was moreover fascinated by the exotic) and morale.
I tried to transfer this atmosphere – coupled with the frenzy of war – in the novel. The situation can be shocking but the language isn’t. I tried to use a style à la Flaubert for this novel….Hope I succeeded to reach to the knees of this master stylist….
Because, in private, a lot of American readers asked me why the focus on the dark side of sex in “Baudelaire’s Revenge”, I decided to ask the question to myself on Goodreads and, of course, also to deliver the answer. If you’re interested, you can read it here: https://www.goodreads.com/questions/169869-why-is-baudelaire-s-revenge-so
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