After his magnum opus Chapel Road, the Flemish writer Louis Paul Boon continued his experimentation with narrative form. Minuet (1955) is cleverly structured, telling the same story three times over using the three protagonists as narrators. They are a man, his wife and the girl who helps the wife in the house. The tale is one of marital infidelity, and each account shows the participants in a very different light, although what they all have in common is their realization that they are all ultimately alone.


The husband is a loner who is fascinated by young girls and not interested in his wife. He works in a cold store cut off from the world all day, and spends his spare time in his little room collecting newspaper cuttings which — if the reader identifies these with the string of quotes running across the top of the novella’s pages — give a picture of a sick society. He passively watches the girl as she goes about her business in the house until she initiates sexual contact. It is at this point that his story ends.


The girl, who is intensely curious about the world around her and keeps a close eye on the man and his wife, is the first to realize that the wife is pregnant. She takes a malign delight in the wife’s discomfiture with the changes in her body and is perfectly aware of the man’s interest in her. In fact she consciously teases him until one day she decides to ‘touch him everywhere’, revelling in his defencelessness and pain. At the end, her narrative reveals one more piece of information than his that the wife enters the room at this moment. Hers is the last story, and she reveals the impact of this discovery. It forces her to face up to what the other two already know: that despite family and society she is alone. Until this point, her solution to her sense of alienation had been to seek company, keep busy and not think about things. This wilful naivety may explain why she agreed to meet her brother-in-law in the garden after dark. He rapes her, she becomes pregnant — the secret that deepens her isolation.

Then, one day, I came into the room after having been out for a walk with the child and there she was sitting on the couch with him, bending over him. She had joined in the dance, she was no longer an onlooker but had become a participant. And worst of all: I suddenly understood that she belonged to him. She was of his race, of his kind, I had always thought mistakenly that we must achieve something together. But each of us is an island, surrounded by treacherous water and if ever we achieve anything together it happens purely by accident, it might easily have happened totally differently. But what am I to do now? Live as they live, and wait until the jungle has grown over all this once more? (p. 135-6, tr. Adrienne Dixon)