Belgian author and playwright Jeroen Olyslaegers has been called the enfant terrible of Dutch literature. Film is an important inspiration in his work. In his Radio Books story an alcoholic film producer has a disturbing vision of the future.

Borrn in the Flemish town of Mortsel in 1967, Jeroen Olyslaegers studied German philology at the University of Antwerp. He worked as a researcher at the Louis Paul Boon documentation centre as well as various other organisations and festivals in the fields of literature and cinema.

With a passion for theatre, he's been involved in numerous productions as writer, translator, actor or director. His play ‘Mood on the go' is based on the life of Oscar Wilde.

He also adapted three scenarios by Russian film-maker Alexandr Sokurov into a theatre work called ‘Wolfskers' in which Lenin, Hitler and Hirohito are losing their grip on reality.

Cinematic inspiration
Olyslaegers' 1994 debut novel ‘Navel' is full of references to the visual language of film and video, specifically the work of Italian film directors Federico Fellini and Pier Paolo Pasolini. His short stories have appeared in several publications and he has also been a film critic for the Flemish magazine Humo.

It should come as no surprise that for Radio Books Olysaegers has written a story with many layers of cinematic inspiration. The central character is Donald, a down-and-out film producer struggling with alcoholism. His latest project has been rejected by the Film Fund and his wife is about to leave him.

"Summer in Antwerp... Donald is lying on the sand of the left bank, a half-empty bottle of Stolichnaya beside him. Donald is a film producer. In any normal Western country a word like that would easily fill a room. But not here, here it's meaningless, this is not a land of cinema."

 
Isle of the Dead
There are less obvious film references in the story. Donald visits his screenwriter friend who is playing Sergei Rachmaninov's symphonic poem ‘The Isle of the Dead' - based on a work by the 19th-century Swiss symbolist painter Arnold Böcklin. The painting also inspired a 1945 film starring Boris Karloff.

Other artists inspired by the painting include playwright August Strindberg, surrealist Salvador Dali and director Alfred Hitchcock who reportedly used it as a visual frame of reference for his film ‘Vertigo'. In Olyslaegers' story, it refers more directly to Donald's disturbing vision of the future.

"Imagine that one day you can read crystal clear everything about your life that can be recorded in lists. And after years of unchecked abuse  of drink and drugs, you realise you are discovering things which it probably  would have been better not to know, because the lists show not merely what you have already done but also what remains. And here is where
the story begins..."

'God is Quick to Punish' by Jeroen Olyslaegers was translated by Michael O'Loughlin. 

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.