My Little War (Belgian Literature) - Softcover

[B]y far the best thing produced by post-war Belgian literature. --Marnix Gijsen

His blitz technique produces its strangest effects in this little journal from the war and the post-war period, which booms crazily, as if Boon s typewriter had been rattling away like a machine-gun. --R. F. Lissens

This slender volume, originally published in 1947 but only now available in English for the first time, is an anti-epic. Boon is less interested in his own misfortunes than in those of the people he encounters along his way. --Jim Ruland

The great Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon began his life's work with this extraordinary novel, a story of World War II as seen through the unglamorous, uncourageous, unhistorical eyes of the man on the street. Frustrated with the dainty, straightforward, neatly chronological narratives that dominated fiction in his country, Boon started including overheard conversations, newspaper articles, manifestos, and other sights and noises of daily life in his work. Happily foul-mouthed and dirty-minded, eager to wade into the mud, Boon was resolutely unliterary while pursuing the most literary of goals: a new kind of writing, and a more honest way of looking at the world.