The Swordfish     by Hugo Claus, Translated by Ruth Levitt Original title: De zwaardvis Original language: Dutch Original year: 1989 Published by Peter Owen Pub. Date: January 1996 Pub. Place: UK Format: Hardcover, 104 pages Dimensions: 0.52 x 8.85 x 5.68 in inches ISBN: 0720609852 List Price: $29.95, £14.95 buy now directly from the publisher Free Shipping Worldwide Published by Peter Owen Publishers / UNESCO Publishing, Paris Pub. Date: 1996 Format: 104 pages Not available for ordering

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This is a short but tense novel. It is a murder story; everything happens within a couple of days in the vicinity of one small Flemish town. There are only half a dozen characters. It is far less complicated than the author’s monumental masterpiece The Sorrow of Belgium, and has none of that novel’s excursions into the intricacies of local politics. For the foreign reader, The Swordfish offers a most suitable introduction to Hugo Claus, the leading Belgian writer of his generation.


All the characters in the book, whether they realize it or not, have psychological problems to overcome. Sybille Verhegge, the attractive, restless, well-off, recently divorced owner of a small estate had a propensity to get her husband drunk and dress him in women’s clothes. She also enjoys erotic dreams about her housemaid. She is completely out of her depth when it comes to dealing with her schoolboy son, Martin, who misses his free-thinking father, and has been encouraged by a rather dotty elderly music mistress to embrace Roman Catholicism. He spends much of his time crawling through the orchard groaning Christ-like under the weight of a wooden cross or attacking Evil with his toy sword in the manner of a mythical Swordfish.


His supply of crosses is made for him by his mother’s handyman, Richard, a vet who has come down in the world following his imprisonment for helping desperate local girls secure abortions. He cuts the grass and thatches the roof. He drinks far too much, often with his wife Jenny, and is kind to Martin.


And then there is Willie Goossens, the local headmaster, who writes operas and whose artistic merits are appreciated by none of the local philistines, least of all by his vulgar wife. His latest work, which retell the pieces of this ingenious jigsaw come together.

Martin holds the splinter of wood up in front of him. His lance, his sword not long enough, but it does not matter. He can be smaller than a real swordfish in the same way that Jesus can be a fish....the largest loveliest, strongest, slinkiest fish in all the oceans..., the swordfish is the noblest. Its flesh is inedible, it never sleeps, it weighs a thousand kilos, its sword is sharper and swifter than Zorro’s. It notices everything, dead fish, sick fish, wounded fish with coughs...and gobbles them up. It slays whales and it slays ships which it thinks have disguised themselves as whales. ...It is an angel and an animal at the same time and it has to chop up sinners and tax-collectors into small pieces like lightening. Dark purple in the ice-cold currents under the sea. (p.81-2, tr. Ruth Levitt)