Chapel Road

by Louis Paul Boon, Adrienne Dixon (Translator), Chad W. Post (Introduction)

Overview

A meta-textual matryoshka doll of a novel from a renowned voice in Flemish literature.

The twisting narrative of Louis Paul Boon’s 1953 masterpiece follows a young girl named Ondine and her brother Valeer, born into poverty at the turn of the century in the industrial city of Aalst, Belgium. Ondine’s coming of age is interwoven with a reworking of the medieval fable of Reynard the Fox, as well as a metanarrative in which an author named Louis Paul Boon and his colorful group of friends discuss the writing of a novel named Chapel Road, debating how best to present Ondine’s story.

Groundbreaking among post-war Dutch literature for its postmodern structure and irreverent, dialect-studded use of language, Boon’s allegory of the rise and fall of socialism in Flanders presents his theory of the novel as a type of “illegal writing” where digressions are far more important than a carefully constructed plot.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781628975192
Publisher:	Deep Vellum Publishing
Publication date:	10/21/2025
Series:	Dalkey Archive Essentials
Pages:	340
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 8.50(h) x 0.00(d)

About the Author

Louis Paul Boon (1912-1979) started out as a house painter but went on to become the author of a large and rich oeuvre spanning several genres: from the compelling historical epics he composed later in life to his sharp, witty work as a newspaper columnist and his tongue-in-cheek, scabrous novels. Boon is one of the most important writers of Flemish literature in the twentieth century, a keen observer of society, the individual and the interplay between them.

Adrienne Dixon is a translator of Dutch and Flemish literature.

Chad W. Post is the founder and publisher of Open Letter Books. He is also the editorial director of Dalkey Archive Press, where he was formerly the associate director. Over the course of his career, he founded the Translation Database, the Best Translated Book Awards, multiple literary podcasts (Two Month Review, Three Percent), the Three Percent website, and currently writes two newsletters: The Three Percent Problem, and Mining the Dalkey Archive. He is also the author of The Three Percent Problem: Rants and Responses on Publishing, Translation, and the Future of Reading. His articles and book reviews have appeared in a range of publications. In 2018 he received the Words Without Borders Ottaway Award for the Promotion of International Literature.

Read an Excerpt

Chapel Road which is the book about the childhood of ondine, who was bom in the year 1800-and-something . . . who fell in love with mr achilles derenancourt, director of the spinning mill ‘the filature’, but who will at the end of the book marry poor oscarke . . . about her brother valeer-traleer, with his monstrous head wobbling through life this way and that . . . and about mr brys who was one of the first socialists without knowing it. . . about her father, vapeur, who wanted to save the world with his godless machine, and about all the things which I can’t quite recall now, but which try to draw a rough sketch of the laborious RISE OF SOCIAL­ISM, and of the decline of the bourgeoisie which got knocked down by two world wars and collapsed.

Editorial Reviews

An important reissue of a classic Dutch novel whose Flemish author (1912-79) was an early metafictionist and a political maverick and chameleon frequently compared to Louis-Ferdinand Céline and John Dos Passos. Chapel Road (1953) is an inordinately ambitious text whose central narrative focuses on its protagonist, ondine, a wily and amoral survivor who escapes her native slums to join the fledgling socialist movement in early-19th-century Flanders. Her (mostly political and amatory) experiences are counterpointed against a vivid retelling of the medieval Dutch legend of Reynard the Fox, and also theoretical and autobiographical commentary by (ondine's creator) the novelist within the novel, ebulliently loquacious johann jenssens (Boon has no more truck with capitalization than with capitalism). A rich, rowdy, unruly, and fascinating work (and a possible influence on Grass's The Tin Drum?). Boon is a forgotten writer very much deserving of a revival.

Kirkus Reviews