Bruges La Morte     by Georges Rodenbach, Translated by Terry Hale Original title: Bruges la Morte Original language: French Published by Atlas Press Pub. Date: 1993 Format: Paperback, 105 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.39 x 8.47 x 5.35 ISBN: 0947757589 Edition: Revised Edition List Price: $12.99, £6.50 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.50 Published by Atlas Press Pub. Date: 1993 Format: Paperback, 112 pages List Price: £6.50 Not available for ordering

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Georges Rodenbach’s novella Bruges-la-Morte was originally published in 1892. The translation by Thomas Duncan dates from 1903 but was usefully revised by Terry Hale in 1993. The novella is a minor masterpiece of the Belgian Symbolist movement. It is the story of an ill-fated love affair between Hughes Viane, a forty-year-old widower who has been living in Bruges for ten years, and is in continual mourning for his beautiful wife who died suddenly at the age of thirty, and a young actress he meets on the streets of the medieval city. Viane thinks he sees his wife in the actress’s appearance and becomes obsessed with her; eventually he sets her up in a ‘pleasant little house’ on the other side of town, where he visits her in the afternoons.


When he allows her to come to his apartment (she wants to assess what sort of wealth he has), she desecrates the shrine he has built to his late wife and this provokes him — in a melodramatic ending — into strangling her with a lock of his wife’s hair. The plot of this rather odd novella is thin, the characters not greatly developed; the real appeal is Rodenbach’s fine evocation of the historic and beautiful city of Bruges (black-and-white photographs of the city are reproduced in the English edition). In fact atmosphere takes precedence over plot in this haunting and quirky gem of Franco-Belgian writing.

‘Uninterruptedly, the bells of Bruges fulfilled their function of mourners, pouring without respite psalmody into the air. With their music was transmitted an augmented sense of the vanity of all things; of the futility of struggle; or the imminence of death. p64