Wil

Angry old man Wilfried Wils, retired Antwerp policeman and underappreciated poet, rages against old age, the modern world, his family and friends, and — as we soon start to see — more than anything else against himself and the way he acted during the German occupation of the city.

Through the

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French teacher his father fixed him up with in his teens, he learnt to appreciate Rimbaud, but he has also been drawn into the fringes of the Flemish fascist movement, and — even though he is plainly disgusted by their ideas — he weakly allows himself to take advantage of these connections when the Germans arrive, and is inevitably drawn into more and more damaging compromises.

Olyslaegers cleverly doses Wils's self-contempt against his clear-sighted view of what was going on in the city during the occupation and his passionate love (clearly shared with the author) of Antwerp's cultural and linguistic heritage. Whilst we are clearly meant to disapprove of Wils's entanglement with the SS and SD, Olyslaegers also obviously suspects that no-one could really survive for five years under those conditions without making some kind of compromises somewhere along the line, and that those who proclaimed their ideological purity after the war were either hypocrites or self-deceivers.

The audiobook is a tour-de-force: Olyslaegers plainly loves playing the curmudgeonly old Wils, and he puts a great deal of feeling and humour into it, even if it's occasionally difficult to follow if you don't come from Antwerp...

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