The Misfortunates: A Novel

by Dimitri Verhulst

Overview

Frank, tender, and brutally funny, Dimitri Verhulst's semi-autobiographical story details the vibrantly entertaining journey of a boy growing up in a family of alcoholics in Belgium

Sobriety and moderation are alien concepts to the men in Dimmy's family. Useless in all other respects, his three uncles have a rare talent for drinking, a flair for violence, and an unwavering commitment to the pub. And his father Pierre is no slouch either. Within hours of his son's birth, Pierre plucks him from the maternity ward, props him on his bike, and takes him on an introductory tour of the village bars. His mother soon leaves them to it and as Dimmy grows up amid the stench of stale beer, he seems destined to follow the path of his forebears and make a low-life career in inebriation, until he begins to piece together his own plan for the future.

Bringing to life the shambolic upbringing that The Guardian describes as, "the odd, ugly, excremental poetry of their grubby lives," The Misfortunates "can be unexpectedly tender as well as uncomfortably funny… this novel continually surprises and intrigues."

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250035172
Publisher:	St. Martin's Press
Publication date:	10/15/2013
Sold by:	Macmillan
Format:	eBook
Pages:	208
File size:	300 KB

About the Author

DIMITRI VERHULST is the Belgium author of a collection of short stories, a volume of poetry, and several novels including Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill and Problemski Hotel.

DIMITRI VERHULST is the award winning author of poetry, plays, and fifteen novels. He has won the Libris Prize, one of the most prestigious literature prizes in the Dutch language, and his work has appeared in 25 languages. His novel Problemski Hotel has been inscribed in the List of the Unesco Collection of Representative Works and the movie based on The Misfortunates won the Prix Art et Essai at The Cannes Film Festival. He lives in Sweden.

Read an Excerpt

The Misfortunates

A Novel

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By Dimitri Verhulst, David Colmer

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 2007 Dimitri Verhulst
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-250-03517-2

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CHAPTER 1

A Good-Looking Kid

My Auntie Rosie's supposed return to Arsendegem came as a pleasant shock in the lives of our completely useless men, whose number I was on the verge of increasing. The day opened with her name – Rosie! Rosie! – bringing hope. Because someone had come back. Someone who had been born here and had left this place had come again! And it had been Rosie! Her return was interpreted as an Old Testament sign, proof that even Arsendegem had redeeming features and we too were not as worthless as had been mathematically established.

It's true that my Auntie Rosie was an unusually beautiful woman, and having been to bed with her was a source of considerable prestige. At the height of her beauty my grandfather, who didn't have an ounce of respect for anyone who couldn't hold his booze, happily accepted round after round from brave young men who hoped to swill their way into his favour by challenging him to drinking contests, with their standing as ideal son-in-law as the stakes. By then the cancer had already metastasized all through his yardstick of a body. More and more often he needed to interrupt his phenomenal drinking sessions to go and spew blood in the toilet, and he didn't live to see his much-admired daughter finally wed. Five fathoms – apparently that's the depth to which drunkards too are lowered into the merciful earth. Until my grandmother wasted away in an old people's home, she saw it as her widowly duty to buff up his pitch-black marble slab once a week. After the funeral of her father, Our Supreme Drinker, Auntie Rosie gave herself away to a man without history and moved with him to our distant capital, much to the sorrow of our own young men, who had to content themselves with blighting the lives of uglier women. Yet again, Arsendegem saw that everything beautiful must leave or be destroyed.

Auntie Rosie wanted less and less to do with her home town; tearing herself away with the help of a man (we weren't even sure of his name, let alone his capacity for drink) must have made as much of an impression on her as a narrow escape from death. During rare telephone conversations, she talked about accumulated wealth, the bustling city, renovating the roof garden and the pleasures of a sauna. The summertime postcards she sent to keep in touch with the home front bore unimaginative, sunny greetings from remote destinations we refused to look up in the atlas. And during her even less frequent visits, we begged her husband not to park his enormously expensive car in front of the house. We were poor, always had been, but we bore our poverty with pride. A flash car in front of the house was a humiliation, and the thought that a fellow resident of Arsendegem might notice that a Verhulst had amounted to something financially was a shameful thing.

It's like this: I spent my first years with my parents in Kanton Street on a tiny courtyard with a communal water pump and a communistic toilet – a hole in a plank, directly above the septic tank. Water ran down the inside of the living-room walls and we stuffed balls of newspaper into the worm-eaten window frames to keep out the wind. My father always spoke of the inconveniences of our residence with pride – longing for an easy life was a clear sign of inadequate masculinity – and when we finally moved to Mere Street it was only to be even worse off. Our new toilet was a hole in a plank as well, but this house had the advantage of a leaking roof. Our kitchen floor was covered with buckets that caught the drops from the ceiling. We spent pleasant evenings together on the sofa listening to the well-rounded sound of splashing and trying to guess the xylophone tunes the ruined roof was playing us. We refilled the little bowls of rat poison daily: instead of exterminating the vermin, we felt like we were doing a good job of taking care of the little critters. And we cherished the rotten, mushroom-sprouting death trap of a staircase over the cellar as a prime example of proletarian architecture. My father was a socialist and went to great lengths to be recognized as such. For him, possessions were nothing more or less than extra dusting. You didn't own them, they owned you. If a burst of unexpected thrift put us in danger of reaching the end of the month with a financial surplus, he hurriedly plundered the bank account and drank his entire pay packet to protect us from the temptations of capitalism. Unfortunately my mother revealed herself more and more as a bourgeois cow: she was too vain for worn-out shoes and filed for divorce after just ten years of marriage. When she left, she took everything that wasn't nailed down, thus granting my father ultimate bliss. At last he owned nothing, neither wife nor other furniture, and moved back in with his elderly mother. But this much is clear: we looked down on family members who parked their fancy cars in front of the house when they showed up in disgustingly expensive clothes to visit us on holidays.

Inimitable, the rhythm of the rumour that Rosie – miraculous! miraculous! – had returned to Arsendegem, and I spent those days being constantly buttonholed by reborn men who wanted to know if the town's drunken mouth was speaking the truth. It definitely was: to our astonishment as well, Auntie Rosie had come back with two black eyes and her head bowed, asking if she and her daughter could move in with us for a while.

'With us' meant with my grandmother. Four of her five sons, my father amongst them, had made a mess of their love life and moved back in with their mother. As my own mother was sick to death not just of my father but of me too, my grandmother had taken me under her wing and I passed the listless days together with my father and three uncles. Now we were going to be joined by my Auntie Rosie and my cousin, Sylvie, on the run from a man who tormented them with adultery and aggression.

I only saw my Brussels cousin sporadically, usually at funerals or on New Year's Day, when we sensed that we came from different worlds and wisely ignored each other. I suspected her of playing the piano and ballet dancing in pink tutus. She was the kind of girl who kept track of how many calories she put away daily and took it for granted that her Father Christmases would always have fat bank accounts. University was a certainty on her horizon, and since she'd inherited her mother's beauty, she would soon be able to entertain herself by encouraging men to waste their time trying to win her over. She was a little younger than me, but gave such a self-assured impression that I didn't dare to pull seniority on her in any field at all. I was not happy about her arrival. Our male bastion had suited me just fine without her getting in the way. Sylvie's respectable upbringing got to us, and we saw the sorry state we were in reflected in her eyes.

My father always shat with the door wide open. His compost gave off an extraterrestrial stench of farmyard cheddar and he'd often stand in the hall with his clangers hanging free, six feet away from the bowl so I couldn't pretend I hadn't heard him, yelling at me to fetch a fresh bog roll and the rest of the newspaper. He'd done it like that for years and the system worked perfectly: he always got his toilet roll and something to read immediately. But now, with Sylvie watching, it was as if we suddenly needed to apologize for ourselves. We were ashamed of the way we came downstairs in the morning in our Y-fronts with a hand in under the elastic to have a good scratch. We were ashamed of how we sprawled in front of the TV puffing away with our sweaty feet up on the table. We were ashamed of the pounds of raw mince we ate because it was cheap and easy, and we were ashamed of the way we stuck our fingers into the mince to grab a handful to stuff into our mouths before washing it down with cold coffee that had been left standing in a mug from yesterday. We were ashamed of the worms we got from the mince and didn't do anything about. We were ashamed of the way we farted like bandmasters, and we were ashamed of the burps we did nothing to restrain. We were ashamed of swearing for no reason, of the pubic hair we moulted over the bog, of the toenails we tore off with our fingers and left lying on the mat for months. We were ashamed of the cigarettes dangling from our mouths when we dozed off in the armchair, our nicotine-stained teeth and the smell of beer we exuded. We were ashamed of the sluts my grandmother met unannounced at breakfast and the way she always had to ask them what their names were. We were ashamed of our drunken singing, our filthy language, our vomit and the ever more frequent visitations of police and bailiffs. We were ashamed, but we didn't do anything about it.

It was three weeks before Auntie Rosie's husband, Uncle Robert, appeared at our door asking, 'Is Rosie here?' and we said, 'Rosie? No, is Rosie supposed to be here?' and he just broad-shouldered his way into the house, dragged Auntie Rosie out by the hair and kicked her into his car. And my sobbing cousin got into the back seat and disappeared out of my life until the next funeral. We were going to destroy Uncle Robert, there was no doubt of that, preferably extremely slowly and with a knife, and we swore that the next one to hear that he had cancer would take this honourable task upon himself. Because cancer lay in wait for all of us – Our Supreme Drinker had shown the way with style, and we were all agreed that making the age of sixty was the ultimate sign of a petit bourgeois. But if we were honest, we had to admit to relief that my Auntie Rosie and my cousin, Sylvie, were finally out of the house – their presence had been a little too confronting.

A miserable existence doesn't need to be complicated. Sylvie saw my father and uncles appear at the breakfast table in the afternoon where, after ritually smoking their first cigarettes, they would dig into the mince and tinned sardines to dispel the hangover from the night before. The greasy oil the sardines had been floating in would run down their chins until they wiped it off on the sleeve of an unravelling jumper, if they could find the energy. Then they disappeared from the house until returning drunk many hours later. Some people might call it a spiral; we saw it as a cycle. To avoid her father, Sylvie stayed away from school for the whole three weeks, watching me study and write my apathetic lines on the grimy kitchen table. Meanwhile she read books that made her smarter and more eloquent and would eventually open an even bigger rift between her and the rest of the family. In bed I could feel what she was thinking as she lay beside me wide awake and staring at the ceiling while listening to the snoring issuing from my father, who was sleeping it off with his mouth agape and his stinking socks still on his feet. Either that or she'd listen to Uncle Girder grind his teeth. How could she feel anything but disgust for our clothes, which lay in a pile on the floor waiting for my grandmother to throw them in the wash? I don't know what she found worse, the brown butts in the ashtray next to the bed, the sweat patches on the sheets, or my father's socks. She didn't say a word. I would have preferred her to call me to account for our lifestyle, taking me aside for a cousin-to-cousin talk. She didn't say a word and looked down on us.

'Kid, can't you take our Sylvie out for a walk sometime? The girl's gone all wan sitting inside the whole time.'

Where was I supposed to take her? She wouldn't talk to me and she'd looked at me with contempt when I'd used the end of my biro to scrape a lump of earwax out of my skull. Maybe they used cotton buds in Brussels, but so what? If you asked me, she could have shown a little gratitude for the hospitality. Anyway, there was nothing in our town to entertain a spoilt brat like her. She could have basked in the attention my friends would have given her in between hotting up their stolen mopeds, but Auntie Rosie would not have been amused. My friends were perverts and although lending them my cousin would have given me grounds to blackmail them with, I was just a little too honourable. The moment I stepped out of the door with this taciturn and haughty girl, I would be proud of her, I would look out for her. People had better think twice before risking a snide remark about her priggish little ways. But what was I supposed to do with her? Go for a walk? So that, while strolling along, we could ask each other what we hoped to achieve in life? What kind of hobbies we had? How school was going?

Taking Sylvie to the pub was my father's suggestion and it did not meet with the approval of Auntie Rosie. But she too could see that her daughter's complexion was growing more and more cadaverous.

'Which pub you going to?' she demanded.

'The Nook,' he replied. 'Or the Social. Whatever.'

'Will André be there?'

'How am I supposed to know if André's going to be there? You seen me with a crystal ball lately?'

'You'll be careful? And not too late?'

'What do you say, Sylvie? Would you like to go out with Uncle Pierre for a change?'

It annoyed me that we all suddenly tried to talk respectable the moment we spoke to the girl. I did it too. There was something about the look of her that brought it out in you.

Sylvie nodded and put on her coat. Our Kid – that was me – was going too.

'Rosie, lass, why don't you come with us? I know a few who'll be glad to see you. It'll do you good, a bit of fresh air.'

But Auntie Rosie didn't feel like it. 'What about you, Girder? You coming out for a beer?'

'Isaac Newton!' said Girder.

'What?'

'Isaac fucking Newton, I tell you.'

Girder was lying back with his feet up, watching a quiz show.

'I'm sorry to disabuse you, Mrs Peters, but the correct answer to this question is Isaac Newton.'

'Holy moly, you're not as daft as you look.'

'It's a repeat, dimwit. Hang on, I'm coming too.'

* * *

We had no particular reason for choosing the Nook that night; the pubs in our town were interchangeable. The chairs and tables were cheap and plain because they would only get smashed during arguments that started with something everyone forgot about immediately and were over again before the combatants had time to sober up. All the pubs had a jukebox with records that invariably brought tears to our eyes, even though no one would dream of playing them anywhere else. Roy Orbison was the greatest musician of all time: not just of the past and the present, but of the future as well, a future that could not possibly have anything good in store for us. There was nothing more beautiful than to sob into your last beer while the landlady swept the broken glass into her dustpan and the jukebox played Roy Orbison. And then to beg the landlady for one more beer, the last one, really the last one, and then we'd go home and leave her in peace to close her doors, which we would be the first to open again the next day. The difference between the pubs was a matter of very minor details, and the choice between them was most often determined by the number of outstanding tabs we had with some of the landlords, who we didn't dare face until we'd scrimped and saved enough to settle our drinking debts. Of the lot of us, my father was the only one with a regular job – at the post office – but he too could be in the red with the breweries by up to a few weeks' wages.

The Nook was run by a woman who had borne twin dwarfs, whose father disappeared soon after their birth and hadn't been heard of since. A woman alone with two identical, deformed daughters and deep in debt after pouring so much money into her pub. People drank enough, that income at least was secure. And when the dwarfs had to go to school and began making serious inroads into the money, she provided herself with a little extra by the means women always have at their disposal. Unfortunately, this seriously tarnished the reputation of her pub and wives began making unpleasant scenes whenever their husbands came staggering back from the Nook. The twins grew up in the bar. They played with their dolls under the pool table, set up a shop selling beer mats and plastic fruit on the pinball machine and hocked their toys to their mother's kind-hearted customers. They adopted the rough language of the men who spent their nights there, and by the age of ten they were filthy-mouthed slags with an endless repertoire of dirty jokes they recited to the amusement of all. By the age of twelve – they had already stopped growing – they had an alcohol problem because of their habit of drinking the dregs out of the glasses, initially to relieve their mother of the washing up.

In those days there was a popular pub called the Goat in a neighbouring village. The landlord owned an old billy goat and – for a hefty fee and to the great delight of the clientele, who almost died laughing – he would fetch it in from the stable and feed it extra strong beer until it was so pissed it stumbled and knocked over chairs trying to get back to its soft straw to sleep it off. It's quite plausible that this is what inspired the landlady of the Nook, but either way, at some stage, the two dwarfs began trying to drink each other under the table, and phenomenal amounts were bet on which one would stay upright the longest.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from The Misfortunates by Dimitri Verhulst, David Colmer. Copyright © 2007 Dimitri Verhulst. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dedication,
Epigraphs,
A Good-Looking Kid,
The Drowned Baby Pond,
The Tour de France,
Only the Lonely,
Dad's New Girlfriend,
A little about my mother?,
The Pilgrim,
The Collector,
A Cured Man,
The Succession is Secured,
A Folklorist's Delight,
An Uncle to the Boy,
Copyright,

Editorial Reviews

…[a] rich, ribald novel…

The New York Times Book Review - V. V. Ganeshananthan

In this “semi-autobiographical” novel from Verhulst (Madame Verona Comes Down the Hill), the tattered family of narrator Dmitri, or “Dimmy,” lurches through life, frequently drunk and often disorderly. Dimmy, his uncles, and his father live in Arsendegem, Belgium, in a state of squalor about which nobody cares overmuch: “We were ashamed, but we didn’t do anything about it.... A miserable existence doesn’t have to be complicated.” The book itself is uncomplicated. Dimmy wryly relates stories, mostly from his youth, of his relatives’ alcoholic hijinks: getting a cousin drunk for the first time; “gambling to pay off gambling debts”; a drinking contest/bicycle race modeled, improbably, after the Tour de France, in which “vomiting wasn’t against the rules: the puked-up beer would not be deducted from the total.” Verhulst doesn’t shrink from portraying Dimmy in a bad light, as when he describes waiting for his child to be born: “There was still a very slim chance of the child being stillborn.... In that case I would find it difficult to conceal my delight.” This bitingly honest book tips toward the amusing as fiction and toward the dismaying as autobiography. (Oct.)

Publishers Weekly

Dimitri tells the story episodically, and as the episodes accumulate, comic scenes reveal larger causes and repercussions…The Verhulsts are by turns crass, canny, clannish and hapless — headed, in good spirits, for disaster.” —The New York Times

“These often earthy stories…offer a warts-and-all portrait of a family.” —Booklist

“This bitingly honest book tips toward the amusing as fiction and toward the dismaying as autobiography.” —Publishers Weekly

“A family of deeply entrenched alcoholics stumbles its way toward grace in this 2007 novel of misadventure from award-winning Belgian writer Verhulst (Goddamn Days on a Goddamn Globe, 2008, etc.). The grotesque nature of chronic drinking is played as absurdist comedy in Verhulst's book. Admittedly autobiographical, Verhulst's rendering of pub life and the liver-crushing, free-wheeling lifestyle that has long-term effects on the narrator recalls nothing so much as the bittersweet flavor of Charles Bukowski and, by extension, Tom Waits. There's something of a meditation on fatherhood; the patriarch of the family takes his son on a tour of the bars immediately after his birth. But unfortunately, the novel's women become mere afterthoughts to the sport of the day. Drinking, as the narrator Dimmy explains, becomes something of a contest. "God created the day and we dragged ourselves through it," Verhulst writes. "When we still lived like characters in the songs of Big Bill Broonzy, Omer organized an assault on the world drinking record." And the men, be it Dimmy's father or his extended family of uncles, are rather disgusting: sweating, farting, scratching, cursing behemoths for whom beer and the consumption of said is a religion. The novel's pinnacle comes in the form of "The Tour de France," a monumental tribute to the pub crawl, replete with the contestants speeding through the suburbs in their underwear. Verhulst wraps things up nicely as Dimitri outgrows his roots. "I'm not one of them, but I'd like to be," he says. "I wish I could show my loyalty or my love, whatever you want to call those feelings. A poetic, no-holds-barred slice of the European lowlife, with lots of drinking.” —Kirkus Reviews

“Verhulst's prose is always a delight . . .This is a subtle and wonderfully told story.” —Financial Times

“Verhulst's gift for imagery is impressive . . . the humour is pitch-black and very funny.” —Prospect

“Ceaselessly entertaining . . . it bursts with humour and energy that never lets up.” —BookMunch

“Outrageousness yields to eloquent recognition in this darkly intelligent novel.” —Irish Times

“This is a welcome addition to the ranks of literary fiction that find humour, and sometimes poetry, in urban deprivation.” —Independent

“Verhulst is a writer with an understanding of those who fail, and writes acutely and authentically.” —De Standaard

“Verhulst is probably one of the most sensitive, most poetic of the new young Flemish writers. But none of his contemporaries has the same hardness. Sometimes his pen comes down like a hammer.” —De Morgen

From the Publisher

2013-09-15
A family of deeply entrenched alcoholics stumbles its way toward grace in this 2007 novel of misadventure from award-winning Belgian writer Verhulst (Goddamn Days on a Goddamn Globe, 2008, etc.). The grotesque nature of chronic drinking is played as absurdist comedy in Verhulst's book. Admittedly autobiographical, Verhulst's rendering of pub life and the liver-crushing, free-wheeling lifestyle that has long-term effects on the narrator recalls nothing so much as the bittersweet flavor of Charles Bukowski and, by extension, Tom Waits. There's something of a meditation on fatherhood; the patriarch of the family takes his son on a tour of the bars immediately after his birth. But unfortunately, the novel's women become mere afterthoughts to the sport of the day. Drinking, as the narrator Dimmy explains, becomes something of a contest. "God created the day and we dragged ourselves through it," Verhulst writes. "When we still lived like characters in the songs of Big Bill Broonzy, Omer organized an assault on the world drinking record." And the men, be it Dimmy's father or his extended family of uncles, are rather disgusting: sweating, farting, scratching, cursing behemoths for whom beer and the consumption of said is a religion. The novel's pinnacle comes in the form of "The Tour de France," a monumental tribute to the pub crawl, replete with the contestants speeding through the suburbs in their underwear. Verhulst wraps things up nicely as Dimitri outgrows his roots. "I'm not one of them, but I'd like to be," he says. "I wish I could show my loyalty or my love, whatever you want to call those feelings." A poetic, no-holds-barred slice of the European lowlife, with lots of drinking.

Kirkus Reviews