A matter of existence: Flanders in the world

'I am writing about the Flemish seminal novel Pallieter by Felix Timmermans, whose biographer Gaston Durnez I must commemorate in an In Memoriam. He himself wrote about the English critic GK Chesterton, whom I evoke as the inspiration for Michel Houellebecq's famous Submission, a novel about Islam. Ayaan Hirsi Ali analyses and criticises this Islam in her book Ketters but in my opinion does not go far enough. I suffer from Islamophobia. I am writing about the Scared White Man who is no longer allowed to be white because of the pomo atmosphere that I discuss in a review of Tinneke Beeckman's book Macht en onmacht. I write about the deep friendship between Johan Daisne and Filip De Pillecyn, once opponents in the context of a war that I have break out in Jonathan Littell's monstrous novel The Kindly Ones, a war that Herman Van Goethem describes in The Year of Silence (1942) – a study that I confront with Monsieur Klein, the anti-hero in Losey's film of the same name. I write about alienation as Jaap Kruithof thought of it, and as Michel Houellebecq (again) romanticized it in The Map and the Territory. About the left-wing debacle called Cuba. I also write about miserable rescue attempts by the left in Flanders, such as the G1000 and a sad Ark Prize for Anuna. And about Flanders' existence.'