If Hugo Claus is Belgium’s main contender for the Nobel Prize, it is on account of novels like Desire, which fairly creak at the seams with significance although they are nevertheless a bit short on intellectual rigour. At the same time it is a rather good joke played on two literatures. Small-town Flemish types of the sort found in regional novelists like Streuvels and Walschap [both reviewed in this Babel Guide] are updated to the year 1978 and are found congregated in ‘The Unicorn’, where they spend their time drinking, playing cards, stuffing themselves and being totally obsessed with sex. A thin excuse is then found to send two of them on a ten-day visit to Los Angeles and Las Vegas in a reverse parody of the American comic classic, Gentlemen Prefer Blondes.


Jake and Michel, the two ‘innocents abroad’, are tolerant enough by Belgian standards but unprepared for the version of liberalism they discover on America’s West Coast. Disappointment and scorn give way to boredom and culminate in a casual murder. So casual, in fact, that the travellers give it hardly another thought. Their problems have more to do with the past than America’s glittering and unreal present for, as in many Claus novels, it is something nasty but unspecified there that haunts them and distorts their responses. Returning with slightly more insight than they left, and therefore now ‘outsiders’, Jake and Michel quit The Unicorn and live more or less unhappily ever after.


The style of the novel is racy and impressionistic. It is through the accumulation of detail that Claus’ disenchantment with America is expressed. He deliberately chooses stereotypes for heroes, the settings in which they are placed are stereotypical, as are their reactions. What is novel, and an augury for the future, is the impression Claus leaves of an America so empty and dehumanising that it is not even worthy of contempt. Compared to Claus’ America, ‘The Unicorn’ is a beacon of civilisation. The rest of us, he seems to be saying, got on very well without America before it was discovered and can continue to do so now.

(And desire. What’s the American word for that? I’ve got to know.) Jake asks her.

‘Want?’ he says. ‘To want? The word for want?’

‘You want it? You’ll get it,’ she says with a fruity laugh.

‘I feel want,’ he says, laying his hand on his heart like an opera singer on TV. (My desire is like a boxing match that starts up again each morning, a two-fisted bout with being alone, with being left alone, with the unimaginable weariness I’m feeling right now.)

‘American word for want,’ he says. In the bedroom, the boy flings his newspaper against the wall. He stands in the doorway, his hair sticking out all over his head like stalks of beach grass. A mildly amused and wicked grin appears on his pointed face.

‘Dee-zey-yuh,’ he says. ‘That’s the American word. Right?’ He has his mother’s eyes.

‘Thank you.’

‘Jeff’s a whizz at crosswords,’ says Rachel tenderly. (p. 204, tr. Stacey Knecht)