![]() However, a storm of protest, especially vociferous because of numerous literary celebrities, and a cunning lawyer with literary aspirations, Edmond Picard, did their part in acquitting Eekhoud. Although it was well received by most critics, like Rachilde and Eugène Demolder, a lawsuit was launched against it. Eekhoud makes much less use of the elaborate and old-fashioned words that make the reader stop and wonder.Ī clear and resolute novel about homosexuality, Escal-Vigor was heading towards trouble. ![]() As for its composition, Escal-Vigor is the least decadent of Eekhoud's works. The story goes without detours to its final scene of the martyrdom, the moment that the tortured bodies testify of the justness of their cause. Escal-Vigor is a homogeneous, linear text. According to Eekhoud's biographer Mirande Lucien, Escal-Vigor was the book of a man who wanted to speak about himself in all freedom. Many of these readers were shocked, because the book is concerned with love between men. This is the name of the castle of its protagonist, count Henry de Kehlmark, but it conveys the name 'Escaut', French for the river Scheldt, and 'Vigor', Latin for Power. In 1899 Eekhoud offered to his readers a new and daring novel, Escal-Vigor. The rustic Campine was in this book replaced with the brutal life of love and death in the Antwerp dockland metropolis and its dirty industry. It has also been translated in English, German, Dutch, Russian and Romanian. ![]() His most famous novel, La nouvelle Carthage (= The New Carthage) was published in its definitive form in 1893, and many times reprinted. He had a distinct style permeated with enthusiasm for the roguish young farm labourers and their rough-and-tumble lives. By now Eekhoud's established subject was the rural Campine, a poor farmers' district east of Antwerp. In 1886 his novel Les milices de Saint-François (= The Soldiers of Saint Francis Xavier) was published. ![]() For his second prose book, Kermesses (= Fairs, 1884), not only Goncourt and Huysmans praised him, but also Émile Zola, about whom Eekhoud had written an essay in 1879. Eekhoud received some guarded praise by famous authors like Edmond de Goncourt and Joris-Karl Huysmans who both sent Eekhoud a personal letter. The renowned free-thinking publisher Henri Kistemaeckers brought out a second edition three years later. Kees Doorik, his first novel was published in 1883, about the wild life of a tough young farmhand who committed a murder. In the beginning of the 1880s Eekhoud took part in several of the modern French-Belgian artist movements, like Les XX (= The Twenty) and La Jeune Belgique (= Young Belgium). In 1877, the generosity of his grandmother permitted young Eekhoud to publish his first two books, Myrtes et Cyprès and Zigzags poétiques, both volumes of poetry. First as a corrector, later he contributed a serial. When he came into his own he started working for a journal. A member of a fairly well-off family, he lost his parents as a young boy. He tended to portray the dark side of human desire and write about social outcasts and the working classes.Įekhoud was born in Antwerp. Elisa_rolle Georges Eekhoud ( – ) was a Belgian novelist of Flemish descent, but writing in French.Įekhoud was a regionalist best known for his ability to represent scenes from rural and urban daily life. ![]()
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