Bruges-La-Morte - Tapa blanda

This is one of the greatest novels ever written about grief, loneliness and isolation; and such subjects are, alas, always relevant these days. (Those suffering similar personal circumstances will find it remarkably consoling.) It is the kind of book, I kept thinking, that should have been turned into an opera by Debussy, along the lines of what he did with Pelléas et Mélisande, by Rodenbach's contemporary and fellow-townsman Maeterlinck. As it turns out, Erich Korngold did such a thing in 1920, but the Nazis banned it, and I'm not sure that he would have had the right musical attitude. If Debussy hadn't done it, Alban Berg would have been ideal. I keep thinking about music so much because so much music resides in the words, even in (the very able) translation. This is a book which is not only richly, almost oppressively, atmospheric: it is about atmosphere, about how a city can be a state of mind as well as a geographical entity. It has its shocks and its melodrama: but it is a haunting, and a haunted work. Congratulations to Dedalus for reviving it. --Nick Lezard's paperback of the week in The Guardian

A widower of five years, Hugues wanders Bruges in mourning. Heavy with a spectral misery, Rodenbach's symbolist novel, first published in France in 1892, is a compelling albeit flawed work. As Alan Hollinghurst remarks in his introduction, it is a novel 'by turns crude and subtle', but although not a classic, it is also significantly more than a curiosity. There is an opiatic quality to the writing which at its best hovers on poetry's border. Hugues's relationship with the dancer who closely resembles his dead wife provides the plot, but the book s real heart lies in the descriptions of Bruges itself, and its 'amalgam of greyish drowsiness'. --Chris Power in The Times

Dedalus should be treasured: a small independent publisher that regularly produces works of European genius at which the behemoths wouldn't sniff. If the corporations did care to look at this new work, they would find, on the surface, a precursor to W G Sebald, a Symbolist vision of the city that lays the way for Aragon and Joyce, and a macabre story of obsessive love and transfiguring horror that is midway between Robert Browning and Tod Browning. Bruges, 'an amalgam of greyish drowsiness', is the setting and spur; Hugues is a widower who finds a dancer nearly identical to his lost love. 'Nearly' is here the operative word. This is a little masterpiece, from a brave publisher. If only Scotland could boast the same. --S.B.Kelly in Scotland on Sunday

Bruges-la-Morte, first published in 1892, is one of the great masterpieces of the Symbolist period and of city writing. Rodenbach does for Bruges what Dickens did for London and Meyrink and kafka did for Prague.Hugues Viane, a widower, has turned to the melancholy, decaying city of Bruges as the ideal location in which to mourn his wife. There he find a suitable haven for the narcissistic perambulations of his inexorably disturbed spirit. The story itself centres on Hugue's obsession with a young dancer whom he believes is the double of his beloved wife.