Absinthe

Absinthe is a police thriller by Guido Eekhaut. The scene is located in the Low Countries, in the cosmopolitan cities of Amsterdam and Leuven.

It is a story about Russian oligarchs, cold-blooded murderers, right-wing politicians and corrupt policemen, typical ingredients of a Saturday evening whodunit on television and I don't see why this story could not become the script for a television thriller. The plot is certainly solid enough to start with.

The main character Walter Eekhaut is the archetype of the stubborn policeman with unconventional methods (somewhat like Inspector Morse). The author sketches several parallel story lines in short chapters, picturing several individual colourful characters. He then brings these lines together in unexpected events that somehow ignite the story, so that you will not easily stop reading. It was a good idea of the writer to serve this story with a glass of Absinthe as this brings in real warmth and taste into the story.

To enjoy all finesses of the unexpected, the reader needs a certain understanding and feeling for rules and procedures that might be applicable in an international police context. Although the author educates his reader in this sense, the lay reader may miss the unexpected in the denouement and at this point the author might have been too demanding of his readership.

The hardcover edition I bought looks and feels very nice and I could not spot a single error in the text.

Slender Man is a book by the same author. You will find an equally good plot and a similar background view on society, but the narrating technique used in Slender Man is quite different.

The Pain of Postmodernism

Postmodernism is a 20th century war product. The central thought of postmodernism is that truth, goodness and beauty are only illusions, chased by ignorant people. Truth, goodness and beauty simply don’t exist. Every kind of veneration already carries the seed of self-destruction. This awkward idea got its power from the destructive forces of the Second World War. The War did not only destroy houses and people, it also destroyed ideas that were originally believed to be great. Postmodernism is, in a strange way, a cultivation of a permanent feeling of disappointment and many artists keep finding their inspiration in postmodernism.

An interesting question is whether postmodernism is still playing a role in today’s society and whether that role is still ‘constructive’, although a constructive postmodernism seems to constitute a “contradictio in terminis”, if not an oxymoron. In his book “History of Progress”, the Dutch author Rutger Bregman points out that postmodernism has not only been good at destroying our traditional beliefs, but also our belief in progress itself. And as “Belief creates the actual fact”, non-belief also destroys the actual fact, therefore non-belief in progress will also halt the actual progress in society.

Cultivating postmodernism, as seems to be the case now since 70 years, constitutes a certain risk of lethargy. Postmodernism has however the merit it makes us critical against all kinds of fanatic belief be it in religion or political systems. It somehow keeps us on a sane track, because all fanatic belief must be insane. A moderate degree of postmodernism is healthy as mainstream current in society, as long as we remain somehow open-minded whenever new ideas emerge.

I refer to my blog “A Sea of Change”. My blog “De donkere kamer van Damokles” covers roughly the same thoughts about postmodernism in Dutch.

Picture: Artwork “Totem” by Jan Fabre and University Library tower, Leuven. This blog is not inspired by recent press.

New Peace Carillon

In my home town Leuven, we celebrated the 100-year end of World War I today by inaugurating a new Peace Carillon in the church tower of the Park Abbey. You need to know three things to understand why this is so important.

First, my home town Leuven was particularly hit by the violence of World War I, when a large part of town was put to fire and a lot of civilians were killed. The inauguration of the new carillon was supported by the German town of Neuss from where some of the troops had originated and with which Leuven now established good relations.

You also need to know that Park Abbey is one of the best preserved original abbey sites of its kind in the Benelux and in Europe. And like with many historic places, its history is deeply interwoven with the lives and the hearts of many local people. And you need to know that carillons belong to the nicest and finest pieces of heritage Flanders has to offer.

What is amazing on this 11 November 2018, is the incredible mobilising force from the centennial celebrations of the armistice. Most people who walked through the rain today never went through a war in their lives. I guess we all realised that our togetherness today is the best way to make clear why we want peace in this world.