Welcome to Litsy!

Verhulst would have done better to stick to his journalistic instincts in these fictional vignettes chronicled by a photographer and resident of a Belgium asylum for those entering the country illegally. The one character trait he seemed to be going for in his MC was 'unlikable', but that and a bunch of cynical & ostentatiously clever wordplay doesn't make a character. Too bad- it seems like the same events could have been compellingly portrayed.

The winner of this giveaway is @Billypar ... I have your address already so will send these along!

I was sent this by the Queen of Bailing but I have a problemski with the tone of the narrator. This is the second supposedly humorous 21st century novel translated from Dutch that I've bailed on, so I might just say that I'm not resonating with Dutch "humor," which I'm gonna need to keep in quotation marks.
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@shawnmooney

I guess Verhulst (whose 'Mme. Verona' I absolutely loved) means well with this warts-and-all story of refugees in a Belgian asylum centre, but a third of the way in I have yet to encounter a character who wasn't perfectly odious. No thanks.

I started this novel about refugees in Belgium a few days ago. I haven't been able to get into it yet, but hopefully I will. It's not the first thing I noticed about this passage, but how strange it is to find this archaic, unusual spelling of 'surprise'!

I enjoyed another of this Flemish writer's novels (linked below) so much that I ordered this one. I'm going to try to get to it for next month's #backlistbinge. This one is about asylum-seekers in Belgium, so quite a departure.