Sign-In
Cart
Chapel Road
Paperback
Series: Dalkey Archive Essentials
General FictionHistorical FictionLiterary Fiction
Publisher Price: $17.95
ISBN13: 9781628975192
Publisher: Dalkey Archive Press
Published: Oct 21 2025
Pages: 340
Weight: 0.93
Height: 0.81 Width: 5.50 Depth: 8.50
Language: English
A meta-textual matryoshka doll of a novel from a renowned voice in Flemish literature.
The twisting narrative of Louis Paul Boon's 1953 masterpiece follows a young girl named Ondine and her brother Valeer, born into poverty at the turn of the century in the industrial city of Aalst, Belgium. Ondine's coming of age is interwoven with a reworking of the medieval fable of Reynard the Fox, as well as a metanarrative in which an author named Louis Paul Boon and his colorful group of friends discuss the writing of a novel named Chapel Road, debating how best to present Ondine's story.
Groundbreaking among post-war Dutch literature for its postmodern structure and irreverent, dialect-studded use of language, Boon's allegory of the rise and fall of socialism in Flanders presents his theory of the novel as a type of illegal writing where digressions are far more important than a carefully constructed plot.
Also from
Boon, Louis Paul
Also in
Literary Fiction
Elizabeth Spencer: Novels & Stories (Loa #344): The Voice at the Back Door / The Light in the Piazza / Knights and Dragons / Stories
Spencer, Elizabeth
Hardcover
Philip Roth: Novels 1973-1977 (Loa #165): The Great American Novel / My Life as a Man / The Professor of Desire
Roth, Philip
Hardcover
John Updike: Novels 1978-1984 (Loa #339): The Coup / Rabbit Is Rich / The Witches of Eastwick
Updike, John
Hardcover
The Patrick Melrose Novels: Never Mind, Bad News, Some Hope, and Mother's Milk
St Aubyn, Edward
Paperback