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Press review for Bruges-la-Morte
" Dedalus’s new edition of Georges Rodenbach’s Bruges-la-Morte (1892) has a palpable sense of a collaborative project, as the many credits, explanations, introductions and endnotes testify. The atmospheric novel has been reincarnated, but this has not been a spontaneous occurrence; nevertheless, it is a successful exhumation. The translators remain faithful to the substance and style of the original, and Alan Hollinghurst’s introduction is stimulating and heartfelt, explaining Rodenbach’s idiosyncrasies without apologizing for them.
Hugues Viane, the protagonist, has mourned his dead wife for ten years. Compelled by grief, he has moved to Bruges, feeling in the town’s empty streets an affinity with his inconsolable passion. He lives alone, and creates a shrine to his wife. When dusk falls, he wanders the desolate streets, ‘ looking for analogies to his grief in deserted canals and ecclesiastical districts’. It is in moments like these that we witness ’the Town as an essential character’, communicating through its bells, fine rain and ambivalent silence. One evening Hugues encounters a woman who so resembles his wife that he believes her to be an apparition. She is Jane Scott, a dancer, whom he pursues to the town’s theatre. Immediately obsessed, he gains her acquaintance and initiates a relationship, fervently believing that she is indeed his wife reborn. Despite his infatuation, he soon discovers the disparity between his death-negating fantasy and the vulgar, modern reality. Meanwhile, Jane exploits him financially and his faithful but devoutly Catholic servant Barbe leaves her disreputable master’s service. Finally abandoned, Hugues confronts Jane before the Gothic scenery of his wife’s shrine.
The plot may seem thin but, as Hollinghurst argues, Bruges-la-Morte should not be judged like other novels. In this Symbolist work, mirrors and metaphors take on a special significance. Rodenbach makes a case for the ‘indefinable power’ of resemblance, appealing to the two contradictory needs of human nature: habit and novelty’. Metaphor – like translation, it might be said- endows old worlds with new life. Resemblance is revealed to be a life, however, just as words are lies, merely metaphors for the concepts they represent. The only assured resemblance Rodenbach can foresee is death, and accordingly the fear of death pervades the novel, deepened by the many reflecting surfaces.
Will Stone’s new photographs constitute an attempt to contribute to the novel’s complicated history of illustration. Perhaps they symbolically mirror the intrusive Doppelganger Jane. Their quality is actually below that of the originals Rodenbach selected, although they do implicitly observe the essential stasis of this medieval town, to which Rodenbach returned obsessively in his own work."