After 10 years of writing, and five books to his name, 40-year-old Emiel Steegman is a small-time author. Faced with an invitation to have dinner with a group of visiting writers, “How many of his colleagues had declined the honour,” Steegman wonders, “before the organisers, finally, had thought of him, of Steegman, always so grateful.”
At the last minute, he conjures up a nebulous white lie. “Owing to a somewhat difficult situation at home,” he writes, the wordsmith in him thinking he’s hit just the right tone – “vague and urgent. Mitigating yet threatening” – and is off the hook for the night.
Later, he wonders what a future biographer would make of this apparent admission of domestic disorder if they stumbled across his email in the course of their research. How they might conjure something out of nothing, “maybe even the central point of the biography, around which other stories can orbit like satellites: the defining event in the life and work of Emiel Steegman”.
This sets the cogs in Steegman’s brain whirring, and the germ of a new novel takes hold. It’ll be the story of a hugely successful author, known simply as T, who, after finding fame and fortune with the publication of an existential crime novel, becomes more and more preoccupied by what his inevitable future biographer will say about him. So much so that T attempts to destroy any paper trail, bar the text of his novels, in his wake, withdrawing entirely from public life, his final interview abandoned mid-flow as he walks out in the very middle of a sentence.
Steegman begins to write his novel, but then, without warning, a truly difficult situation at home arises as disaster strikes at the very heart of his family. His four-year-old daughter Renée has a massive stroke, and life as Steegman knows it is changed forever.
Art imitates life in most complex and ingenious ways in Post Mortem, acclaimed Flemish writer Peter Terrin's fifth novel, deftly translated from the original Dutch by Laura Watkinson. Terrin apparently drew on his own experiences as the father of a young daughter with a severe illness to inform this aspect of the work, the fearful terror and helplessness of which is rendered in raw, completely guileless prose in the novel's mid-section as Steegman charts the days he and his wife spend by Renée's bedside in the paediatric ICU: "I jump up, startled by the first bite of ink-black grief; it's ravenous, it's been waiting for me for hours. It feels like a panic attack in an aeroplane, a fall into ice-cold water: I have to get out."
This, however, is only the tip of a novel that eventually reveals itself to be a towering metafictional iceberg.
Around this central concern of the tempting of fate is woven a tight web of imagination vying with reality as Steegman's life begins to replicate that of his fictional creation T, who in turn owes something to Terrin himself. Steegman's latest novel, The Murderer, is about to be published when Post Mortem begins, "so T," Steegan thinks, "would have written perhaps The Suspect, or The Guard. One joke was surely permitted, one nod. A little extra seasoning. Writers are entertainers too, weren't they?"
Oh so true, and readers familiar with Terrin's previous work will chuckle: his last, a dystopian allegory, which was acclaimed as Kafkaesque and won the European Union Prize for Literature in 2010, was called The Guard.
Metafiction is all the rage; we have only to look towards the work of American author and recent recipient of a MacArthur "genius grant", Ben Lerner, to see how successful it can be. It's "neither fiction nor nonfiction, but a flickering between them", Lerner describes in his novel 10:04.
There's something especially enticing about Terrin's take on the genre, though. Post Mortem a slight novel, but he packs so much into it: not simply multiple layers of meaning and allusions and jests to be interpreted by those in the know, but also a surprising amount of plot, emotion, and even intrigue. By the end I wasn't sure if I'd been reading a meditation of parental love, a murder mystery, or an examination of authorial legacy versus our obsession with uncovering "the story behind the story"; all I knew was it had been a mesmerising phantasmagoria of meaning.
This book is available on Amazon.
Lucy Scholes is a reviewer based in London
thereview@thenational.ae
