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Article: Dossier Delvaux.
- Article from:
- World Literature Today
- Article date:
- March 22, 1998
- Author:
CopyrightCOPYRIGHT 1998 University of Oklahoma. This material is published under license from the publisher through the Gale Group, Farmington Hills, Michigan. All inquiries regarding rights should be directed to the Gale Group. (Hide copyright information)
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Koen Vergeer. Amsterdam/Antwerp. Atlas. 1997. 110 pages. ISBN 90-254-2172-5.
The very matter-of-fact title of Koen Vergeer's second novel, Dossier Delvaux, hides a text oscillating between reality and fiction, using biographical facts relating to the Belgian surrealist painter Paul Delvaux in the context of his pictorial imagination, turning fact into fiction and obliterating all links with reality.
Delvaux's paintings are urban settings filled with railway stations, ruined temples, cool naked women with large empty eyes, skeletons. . . . and, every now and then, the small figure of a man, a seemingly unimaginative civil servant. This Brussels civil servant is ...