Hugo Claus Obituary

From The Telegraph :

 

Hugo Claus, who died on March 19 aged 78, was a versatile and prolific author best known for his sprawling, impressionistic, semi-autobiographical novel The Sorrow of Belgium (1983), in which he threw an unpitying spotlight on bourgeois Flemish society.

 

The novel explored life under the Nazi occupation through the eyes of a teenage boy, and exploded the myth of widespread resistance that provided Belgium with a thin comfort blanket after the war, exposing the extent of collaboration, hypocrisy, religious bigotry and wilful ignorance that had enabled the Nazis to dispose of some 40,000 Belgian Jews with barely a whisper of protest.

Regarded as a landmark of post-war European literature, it won Claus several nominations for the Nobel prize for literature.

During a hugely productive career, Claus published more than 20 novels, more than 60 plays and several thousand poems. His dramatic works - plays, translations and adaptations - made him a major figure in theatre, and he also undertook successful forays into cinema and art.

Although Claus was a dominant figure in Belgian literature, winning numerous awards, his uncompromisingly anti-authoritarian, anarchist views put him at odds with the conservative Catholic mainstream.

He aimed to shock, writing explicitly about incest, homosexuality and masturbation, and featuring nudity on stage. On one occasion a Belgian law court found one of his theatrical productions injurious to public morals and sentenced him to four months in prison. In the 1970s he was briefly married to the young actress Sylvia Kristel, whom he coached for her starring role in the erotic movie Emmanuelle, and with whom he had a son. The relationship ended in 1977, when she left him for the actor Ian McShane.

Claus's death - by voluntary euthanasia after he had developed early symptoms of Alzheimer's disease - was typically controversial, provoking leading Belgian Catholic churchmen to criticise the sympathetic press coverage given to his demise. "I am a person who is unhappy with things as they stand," Claus told an interviewer some years ago. "Each day we should wake up foaming at the mouth because of the injustice of things."...