Bart Moeyaert - Laureate 2019 1
physically present in her imagination. The strong
loving bonds among the abandoned siblings are captured in an unforgettable, dreamlike closing scene. The autobiographical Broere (2002, Brothers) is a warm and humorous story about growing up as the youngest of seven brothers. Throughout its short chapters, Bart is strongly and safely wrapped in the solidarity of brotherhood. As the baby of the family, Bart looks up to his older brothers for their knowledge and abilities, but inevitably also sometimes gets left out. Each brother has his own defining trait, and at age six Bart has already realized that his skill is being able to discover things just by looking around. The book has also been adapted for the stage. SUPPRESSED EMOTIONS The enigmatic, the unspoken and the repressed feature prominently in many of Moeyaert’s books, among them Dani Bennoni (2005, Dani Bennoni – long may he live). A boy named Bing puts on his older brother’s much-too-big football uniform and orders his brother’s friend Dani to teach him to play football. When Dani refuses, Bing tries a new tactic to get his way. The story is compressed, even claustrophobic, and saturated with repressed emotion. Bing’s brother has been called up to a war we glimpse only in the background, paralyzing Bing’s mother with grief and affecting Bing’s choices as well. Bing’s relationship to Dani is complicated by manipulation, blackmail and secret sexual acts. There are no easy, rational or unequivocal choices between good and evil, right and wrong. Much of De melkweg (2011) takes place atop a wall. The protagonist Oscar, his brother Bossie, and a girl named Geesje sit on the wall in the summer heat, surveying the neighborhood. Not much is going on. Inside the wall, Priit and Petra do work with scrap iron. They come from another country and talk in a language that the first-person narrator calls “scrapironese.” Outside the wall, an old lady walks past each day with an old dog. The children place bets on whether the lady or the dog will die first. One day a new girl shows up from a neighborhood further away, upsetting the old order. The characters do what they do next for reasons that are hard to discern, even for them. In the end, however, words come—spoken and written—that help bring the characters closer together. FOR YOUNGER READERS Moeyaert’s books for younger readers feature a strong sense of solidarity with the characters and an often-subtle sense of humor. These short stories have been published both as standalone books and in various collections, and they too are emotionally charged and rich in subtexts. In Echt weg is niet zo ver (1993), ten-yearold Roos’s father has left to get help to stop drinking, yelling and hitting. The family is relieved, but Roos misses her father. She tries to understand her conflicting feelings, and turns to a big sister for comfort and protection when it gets to be too much. FABLES AND FAIRY TALES Bart Moeyaert is largely a realist writer, but he has also drawn inspiration from and set his stamp on fables, familiar fairy-tale tropes and Biblical stories. In a trilogy of picture books, De Schepping (2003), Het Paradijs (2010) and De Hemel (2015), he reimagines Christian creation stories in his own inimitable fashion. The first two books in the trilogy are illustrated by Wolf Erlbruch, the third by Gerda Dendooven. These playful and penetrating children’s