“And It Melts” by Lize Spit

Bovenmeer is a small village in Flanders. From the outside, it looks like a vulnerable and worthy of protection idyll, a microcosm of cows, Catholicism, neighborly proximity. Who lives there, however, complain that barrenness and boredom rule the day and the mutual control of the few residents can be unpleasant.

Unfortunately, escapes the villagers more than would be desirable. Otherwise Eva de Wolf might have been spared the terrible fate that born in Flanders in 1988 author tells Lize Spit in her debut novel “Het Smelt”.

Who made a splash in Belgium after its release in 2016 and garnered prizes. Nevertheless, these are an extremely nerve-sapping, disturbing and debatable reading (translated by Helga van Beuningen). Because of the drastic action of his (not so much the formulations) have to adapt to strong stuff.

equal the ominous opening scene joins the reader to the bizarre, macabre and morbid. The venue is the workshop of Eva’s father. For years he hoards here freebies, deals, useless, waste.

In this compulsive hoarding mess he takes one day his fourteen-year-old daughter, showing her a noose dangling on top roof beams. He explains exactly how and why such a thing was to establish correct, then asked abruptly: “You think just like your mother, that this old idiot never serious about what he says … does not have the courage to do so?” climbs the ladder up, the loop sets around his neck, the daughter advises casually that she had “something to do with [her] hair style” climbs then down again and announced: “You are the only one who is now in the image of self.

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your mother knows none of this. This should remain so. ” Meanwhile, the daughter has thought good, backed up the ladder, and musing about this and that. Shocked no one. Because Eva is all sorts used to. About ways to commit suicide, the parents ponder permanent, unless they are just deranged by alcohol.

In this icy world, have fled the consolation and sympathy long ago, three children grow up. 1985 twins were born as preemies, but only Jolan survived the birth. When he was allowed to leave the incubator three years later, Eva was born. 1991 followed by the delicate Tesje, by all “Scheißerle” launched since her mother the two-year-olds gave this tactless-humiliating nickname. Emotional neglect of her parents’ home care for the children of strange behaviors. Jolan busy for days with dead insects. Tesje leans up from the border to death by starvation and developed obsessive compulsive disorders such as precise maintenance step sequences when climbing stairs and cleaning rituals.

Eva find it hard to integrate with their boyish appearance in the group of primary school pupils. Rather it seeks connection with the only boy in the village, the butcher’s son Laurens and the farmer’s son Pim, but this relationship is always with reservations. Eva serves itself by betrays the two, for example, that their teacher is a lesbian. When the three roam on their wheels through fields, woods and fields, they are free and removed all restrictions. What a disgusting prank the boys then drive, Eva watched with disgust, but to stop them would overwhelm her role.

Soon the interest turns inward. In place of Stupid Boy pranks occurs “Truth or Dare,” the children discover their sexuality. While Eva restrains ashamed Laurens and Pim drive the initially harmless game ahead briskly, up from a perfidious blackmail plan is created. Gradually load the three her classmates into a secret hideout where they need to be solved by clever questions a mystery. But Eve tasks no one can solve. fall after each wrong question needs a garment, so the girls at the end inevitably naked and hungry, cold appraising gaze of the boys are exposed without protection until it unnerved pack their bundles of clothes and flee. When one of the victims to fight back knows the situation escalates to an unspeakably cruel, vile and degrading desecration.

That brutalization and violence rise, fall inhibitions limits are exceeded, we sense from the beginning. But after the strange opening scene we dive for a while in the insular peasant idyll that is only by the been passed on in ever more terrible variations gossip recovery. two hundred pages after about the terrible evil in the action begins hineinzutröpfeln. Rather on the edge, we learn that even death does not stop at Bovenmeer.

The action of the novel begins in 2015. Eva is 27 years old, has lived as long in Brussels, as they had spent in her home village and nothing and no one has since lured back there. As they reached a strange invitation. Pim, companion of children and youth days, invites you to a New Year’s party, which is to apply deceased brother in January and the thirtieth anniversary of its exactly fourteen years ago. Eva finds that the time was ripe and the celebration offer a suitable occasion to settle old scores.

Eva’s drive from Brussels to Bovenmeer gives the novel the rough structure. She remembers her years in the village, to the unbearable family life, to the summer of 2002, the merciless, horrifying events took an almost indescribable end. While she goes and says, the reader always collects new horrors pile up hair-raising passages, the nervous tension can not for more, striving all up to the culmination. Parallel to this increase melting of large ice block, the Eva in a cooler in the back seat of her car carries.

tells what and how Lize Spit, the sense of shame will exceed many readers. According to my personal preferences, I have often wished me, the author would have been in an uproar over remarks alone my head cinema. But I have to admit that I have not felt the descriptions of sexual acts drastic as pornographic. Looking at the initiation story as a whole, these passages get a reasonable function. Moreover, the author demonstrates extraordinary linguistic and creative skill.

As they move between levels of time and herspringt, drop by drop providing long-awaited information, keeps the voltage continuously high, weaves never read reflections, which is skillfully: “Every life is only a sum of numbers, but few manage to keep records in time to start counting. Those who try to be ill or crazy … your life is not a sum, but a difference, bring yourself to zero”.