Background
Hugo Claus was born on April 5, 1929 in Bruges, West Flanders, Belgium. He was the eldest son of Joseph Claus, a printer, and Germaine Vanderlinden. He had three brothers.
Hugo Claus
Hugo Claus
Hugo Claus
Hugo Claus
(While exposing the remains of Flemish fascism twenty year...)
While exposing the remains of Flemish fascism twenty years after the War, Wonder tracks one man's descent into madness. Victor, a bewildered teacher, pursues a mysterious woman to a castle in a remote village. There he finds himself trapped among a handful of desperate individuals still living out their collaboration with the Nazis. As Victor's sanity begins to crumble, he poses as an expert on their messianic leader, who disappeared at the Russian front but whose return they believe imminent. The rich cadences of the prose and dense emotional texture of characters lost in complex moral labyrinths make Wonder a symphony only Claus could have composed.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0980033012/?tag=2022091-20
1962
(In 1939, Louis Seynaeve, a ten-year-old Flemish student, ...)
In 1939, Louis Seynaeve, a ten-year-old Flemish student, is chiefly occupied with schoolboy adventures and lurid adolescent fantasies. Then the Nazis invade Belgium, and he grows up fast. Bewildered by his family ― a stuffy father who welcomes the occupation and a flirtatious mother who works for (and plays with) the Germans ― he is seemingly at the center of so much he can't understand.
http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1585672386/?tag=2022091-20
1983
(Lovable rogues Jake and Michel leave their friends at "Th...)
Lovable rogues Jake and Michel leave their friends at "The Unicorn," their favorite local tavern in Belgium, to embark on a picaresque odyssey of booze and gambling to make their fortunes amid the glitter of Las Vegas casinos.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0670867462/?tag=2022091-20
1997
director playwright author poet
Hugo Claus was born on April 5, 1929 in Bruges, West Flanders, Belgium. He was the eldest son of Joseph Claus, a printer, and Germaine Vanderlinden. He had three brothers.
Hugo Claus attended Roman Catholic boarding school. At the age of fifteen, Claus dropped out of school because did not get along with his family and left home soon after the war. For a time he worked in a sugar factory.
Hugo Claus made his debut as a poet in 1947 with a volume of confessional poetry, which he published on his own. In Paris in the early 1950s he came into contact with existentialism and surrealism, and with artists of the COBRA group, such as Asger Jorn and Karel Appel. In Paris he also met some of the Dutch experimentalist poets of the Vijftigers group: Gerrit Kouwenaar, Lucebert and Remco Campert. He produced several volumes of experimental verse. For example, "De Oostakkerse gedichten" (Poems of Oostakker, 1955).
From about 1960 Claus began to allow more of the outside world and current events to enter into his poetry, witness the outspoken social involvement in volumes such as "De geverfde ruiter" (The Painted Horseman, 1961) or "Van horen zeggen" (Hearsay, 1970). In 1964 Claus began to direct direct films until approximately 2001. One of his films called "The Sacrament" (1989).
His most famous masterpiece was his novel "Het verdriet van België" (The Sorrow of Belgium, 1983), which drew on Claus’s own experience as a youth during the Nazi occupation. For years after the book’s publication, Claus was expected to win the Nobel Prize for Literature. Other Belgian social and political legacies that featured in his work include the colonization of the Congo, the subject of two books, De geruchten ("The Rumours", 1996) and Onvoltooid verleden ("Unfinished Past", 1998). Claus was diagnosed with Alzheimer disease, he elected to be euthanized and died on March 19, 2008.
(Lovable rogues Jake and Michel leave their friends at "Th...)
1997(In 1939, Louis Seynaeve, a ten-year-old Flemish student, ...)
1983(While exposing the remains of Flemish fascism twenty year...)
1962(This volume includes three of Hugo Claus' remarkable earl...)
(Hugo Claus’s poems are remarkable for their dexterity, in...)
(Four taboo-tackling plays from the foremost writer of Dut...)
1980
Quotations:
"I am a person who is unhappy with things as they stand. We cannot accept the world as it is. Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth because of the injustice of things."
"My verses stand gawping a bit. I never get used to this. They've lived here long enough."
On May 26, 1955 Hugo Claus married Elly Overzier, an actress. They had a son, Thomas and later divorced. He had an affair with actress Sylvia Kristel, with whom he had a son, Arthur. Claus married his second wife, Veerle de Wit, in 1993.