From book to book, we find around Michel Van Loo his lifelong accomplices: his beautiful fiancée, Anne, smarter than him, Hubert, the Polish Jewish pharmacist, Federico, the former Italian communist resistance fighter who became a hairdresser, and the Motta brothers , shock unionists.
After following Michel Van Loo since the collaboration in Perils in this Kingdom to our colonial past in The King of Congowe find him in 1957, in charge of a spinning mill in Mechelen but this young woman without history, Gertrude De Vijver, whom he was to follow for a sponsor, is found stabbed in her home.
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But who is this mysterious man who asked him to follow Gertrude? He claimed his name was Diego Bloemkool (Cauliflower), but it is obviously a pseudonym because Michel Van Loo cannot find his trace.
Linguistic disputes
This novel is also a way of returning to our linguistic quarrels. Michel Van Loo noted in 1957 that “my tiny country found itself torn apart by a linguistic dispute that was gaining more and more momentum”quarrel that he judges “absurd, a trap into which politicians of all sides are making us fall to win our votes, for lack of real mobilizing projects. “
In 1957, there was still, in addition, the specter of collaboration during the war. The linguistic dispute between Flemish and French-speaking people was brewing, fueled by a campaign for the rehabilitation of Flemish “uncivilians” condemned at the Liberation. The husband of Gertrude, the murdered woman, had died in the Nazi extermination camps.
Alain Berenboom’s latest novel, “Expo 58, the spy loses his marbles”, puts the Cold War at the heart of Brussels
While searching for his mysterious Diego Bloemkool, Michel Van Loo discovers that he operates under other names and various professions: Luc Boorman, Luc La-main-chaude, a film producer, a tattoo artist, the owner of a guard agency of the body.
His investigation also leads him to another very strange character, Victor Vander Aa, a rich resident of Knokke who has valuable paintings by Ensor and Spilliaert in his living room. Where do they come from? Looted from the Jews? Fake ?
Continuation in this novel to read without moderation as the slogan says, to discover a new part of our Belgian history without complacency.
⇒ The Mechelen cuckoo | Detective novel | Alain Berenboom | Genesis Edition, 272 pp., €22.50, digital €14
EXTRACT
“Back to Mechelen. Clearly, I had a strange relationship with this city. […] In the mist, under the low sky, what difference was there between Mechelen and Brussels, between this world and mine? Barely twenty kilometers separate the two cities as the crow flies. What difference was there really between a Malinois and a Brussels resident?”
