The prose, poetry, and paintings of Hugo
Claus (1929-2008) were as influential as they were
groundbreaking. His novels include The Sorrow of Belgium, his
magnum opus of postwar Europe, as well as Desire, The
Swordfish, Mild Destruction, Rumors, and The Duck
Hunt. His corpus of poetry is immense and stunningly diverse.
Claus's painting led him to become involved in the avant-garde
Cobra movement. Impossible to pin down. Claus was eclectic and in
constant motion; his work is kaleidoscopic. In addition to
receiving every major Dutch-language literary prize, Claus received
the 2002 Leipzig Book Award for European Understanding for his body
of work.
Michael Henry Heim has translated dozens of novels, plays, and
essays from a number of languages. His translations
include The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan
Kundera, My Century by Günter Grass, Helping Verbs of the
Heart by Péter Esterházy, and Thomas Mann¢s Death in Venice.
He is the recipient of the American Literary Translators
Association Prize, the Helen and Kurt Wolff Translation Prize, and
the PEN American Center Ralph Manheim Medal for Translation and is
a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
Winner of PEN Translation Prize 2010
Claus rages against the decay of the physical self while desire
remains untamed. From the beginning, his poetry has been marked by
an uncommon mix of intelligence and passion, given expression in a
medium over which he has such light-fingered control that art
becomes invisible. —J.M. Coetzee
While fully aware that such an honorable title can only be used in
great exceptions in Flemish literature, I would
call Wonder a masterpiece. —Paul de Wispelaere, Vlaamse
Gids
Claus's work is just as broad as the soul is deep. —Gerrit
Komrij
The greatest writer of my generation. —Remco Campert Fine and
ambitious . . . A work of savage satire intensely engaged with the
moral and cultural life of the author’s Belgium . . . Packed with
asides, allusions, and fierce juxtapositions, a style created to
evoke a world sliding into chaos where contrast and contradictions
are so grotesque that we can only ‘wonder’. . . . [Wonder is]
a reminder of the energy and experimental verve with which so many
writers of the Fifties and Sixties (Malaparte, Bernhard, Grass,
Böll, Burgess, Pynchon) conjured up [a] disjointed and rapidly
complicating world. —The New York Review of Books
To speak today of a still largely-unknown major work on European
Fascism . . . seems presumptuous, rather like announcing the
existence of, if not a new continent, at least a land mass of
strange and significant proportions. But in discussing Wonder,
it would be churlish not to admit to an explorer’s exhilaration at
discovery. —The National
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