The Misfortunates

July 22, 2013
In this “semi-autobiographical” novel from Verhulst (Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill), the tattered family of narrator Dmitri, or “Dimmy,” lurches through life, frequently drunk and often disorderly. Dimmy, his uncles, and his father live in Arsendegem, Belgium, in a state of squalor about which nobody cares overmuch: “We were ashamed, but we didn’t do anything about it.... A miserable existence doesn’t have to be complicated.” The book itself is uncomplicated. Dimmy wryly relates stories, mostly from his youth, of his relatives’ alcoholic hijinks: getting a cousin drunk for the first time; “gambling to pay off gambling debts”; a drinking contest/bicycle race modeled, improbably, after the Tour de France, in which “vomiting wasn’t against the rules: the puked-up beer would not be deducted from the total.” Verhulst doesn’t shrink from portraying Dimmy in a bad light, as when he describes waiting for his child to be born: “There was still a very slim chance of the child being stillborn.... In that case I would find it difficult to conceal my delight.” This bitingly honest book tips toward the amusing as fiction and toward the dismaying as autobiography.

September 15, 2013
A family of deeply entrenched alcoholics stumbles its way toward grace in this 2007 novel of misadventure from award-winning Belgian writer Verhulst (Goddamn Days on a Goddamn Globe, 2008, etc.). The grotesque nature of chronic drinking is played as absurdist comedy in Verhulst's book. Admittedly autobiographical, Verhulst's rendering of pub life and the liver-crushing, free-wheeling lifestyle that has long-term effects on the narrator recalls nothing so much as the bittersweet flavor of Charles Bukowski and, by extension, Tom Waits. There's something of a meditation on fatherhood; the patriarch of the family takes his son on a tour of the bars immediately after his birth. But unfortunately, the novel's women become mere afterthoughts to the sport of the day. Drinking, as the narrator Dimmy explains, becomes something of a contest. "God created the day and we dragged ourselves through it," Verhulst writes. "When we still lived like characters in the songs of Big Bill Broonzy, Omer organized an assault on the world drinking record." And the men, be it Dimmy's father or his extended family of uncles, are rather disgusting: sweating, farting, scratching, cursing behemoths for whom beer and the consumption of said is a religion. The novel's pinnacle comes in the form of "The Tour de France," a monumental tribute to the pub crawl, replete with the contestants speeding through the suburbs in their underwear. Verhulst wraps things up nicely as Dimitri outgrows his roots. "I'm not one of them, but I'd like to be," he says. "I wish I could show my loyalty or my love, whatever you want to call those feelings." A poetic, no-holds-barred slice of the European lowlife, with lots of drinking.

COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

September 1, 2013
Meet the Verhulst Family: 13-year-old Dimitri, his father, and his three uncles, all of whom live with the boy's long-suffering grandmother. All the adult males are alcoholics; indeed, if beer-drinking were a craft, these feckless losersonly Dimitri's father is employedwould be master craftsmen! The question is, Will Dimitri become their apprentice? Presented in the form of loosely linked stories, Belgian author Verhulst's semiautobiographical novel shares mock-epic incidents from Dimitri's childhood: an elaborate drinking contest, the revelation of his stylish cousin Sylvie's real father, the repossession of the family's TV, his estranged mother's pee pass (don't ask), and the like. If the tone of these stories is ruefully humorous, that of the four stories that feature Dimitri as an adult is more sardonic, including the one in which Dimitri realizes he has become more uncle than father to his five-year-old son. Aside from the sad visit of Dimitri to his now-senile grandmother, there isn't an ounce of the sentimental in these often earthy stories. Together they offer a warts-and-all portrait of a family whose small lives would otherwise go unremarked.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)