Ivo Michiels has often been called an experimental writer. The 86 year-old Flemish author objects to such labels. But his haunting Radio Books story doesn't take a traditional form.

"A sense of failure drives me to continue," says Ivo Michiels. He was born in Morstel, just outside Antwerp, in 1923. During World War II he worked as a nurse in a German hospital. He made his literary debut in 1946 with a collection of poetry.

For the next ten years he worked as a newspaper journalist, an experience he considers crucial to his development as a writer. "Journalism teaches you to see the relationship between things," he explains. In the 1950's he wrote several traditional novels and film scenarios.

Moral destitution
His publication of ‘Het boek alfa’ (The Book Alfa) in 1963 was credited with introducing the modernistic novel into Flemish literature. Inspired by the French ‘nouveau roman', the book's unsurpassed use of language was highly praised by critics and major literary figures like Samuel Beckett.

The book tells the story of a soldier on guard under threat of imminent war. Its themes of existential uncertainty, feelings of guilt and the search for individual identity are still relevant today. "It seems that those in a state of extreme moral destitution pick up the signals from my books with extraordinary clarity," said Michiels after translations became popular in former Yugoslavia.

Moral regeneration
In 1979 he retired to a village in France and embarked on an ambitious project - a ten-volume series called 'Journal Brut' which he describes as "a search for my other selves." Each volume is devoted to a particular aspect of the author's world. But it transcends the traditional genre of autobiography.

Michiels created a new literary reality filled with its own meanings and a recurring theme of his work: man's capacity for moral and physical regeneration. This is particularly true in the last installment about a film director with locked-down syndrome. Left completely paralyzed but with all five senses functioning, he must find a new method of expression.

"for me no words that tell of living in the world
but rather words that are a world to live in"

It took Michiels over twenty years to complete the series. But the final volume ends cryptically with the phrase: (to be continued)

Obsessive love
Critics have praised Michiels' particularly rhythmic, melodic style and his fine sense of alliteration, assonance and rhyme. These characteristics abound in his story for Radio Books - the haunting tale of a Red Cross worker obsessed with a train conductor.

"Behold: Amandine, desperately in love with Ludovic, the conductor who had reprimanded, rebuked, reproved her. The draft of the 799th letter is still on the table in front of her. Later, it will go into the box with the other 798 drafts, every one of them a letter to Ludovic, because there has never been any reply from him, no thank-you, no greeting, nothing, not even a rejection."

 
‘Amandine, or the thousand letters of love’ by Ivo Michiels was translated by John Nieuwenhuizen. The story is read by Jackie Carver.

The series Radio Books is an initiative of the Flemish-Dutch Huis de Buren in Brussels, in association with the Flemish radio broadcaster Klara and Radio Netherlands Worldwide.