Claus, Hugo 1929-2008 (Hugo Maurice Julien Claus, Hugo Maurice Julius Claus)

OBITUARY NOTICE—

See index for CA sketch: Born April 5, 1929, in Brugge, Belgium; died March 19, 2008, in Antwerp, Belgium. Artist, filmmaker, poet, playwright, and novelist. Claus was one of Belgium's most prolific and well-known writers. It is said that he wrote some 200 works in a career that spanned more than fifty years. He was born in a country bordered by France, Germany, and the Netherlands, where most people spoke French, German, or Dutch; people born in his home region of Flanders often spoke their own language, Flemish, as well; the Belgian people thus found themselves pulled in many directions socially and culturally. The book for which Claus is best known in the United States is The Sorrow of Belgium (1983; translation, 1990), his unequivocal, unvarnished look at a national psyche at war with itself. Claus's novel, semiautobiographical by his own admission, tells of a boy who initially welcomes the Nazi invasion of World War II because of his negative perception of the French, which is based on previous encounters in his homeland. His opinion does not begin to change until the tides of war turn in favor of the Allies. The boy, like many of his countrymen, has to live with that self-knowledge for the rest of his life. Much of Claus's writing, critics have said, reflects a similar preoccupation with hypocrisy, guilt, and shame, particularly as he experienced it as a Roman Catholic growing up in Flanders. Claus may have been known in the English-speaking world primarily for this novel, but he was recognized in his own country and throughout much of Europe for the breadth of his other writings and the scope of his art. He wrote novels, thousands of poems, dozens of plays, and miscellaneous nonfiction works. His writings, especially poetry and plays, often dealt explicitly and uncompromisingly with sex, adultery, incest, homosexuality, and other sensitive topics. Claus was also a painter and sculptor of note, representing a group of abstract expressionists known as the CoBrA school. He directed a few films and plays, including Sugar (1959), which he also wrote. Claus won several European literary prizes, but only a few of his works appeared in English translation, including the novel The Duck Hunt (1955), Greetings: Selected Poems (2004), and The Sacrament and Other Plays of Forbidden Love (2007).

OBITUARIES AND OTHER SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Los Angeles Times, March 25, 2008, p. B9.

New York Times, March 30, 2008, p. A20.

Times (London, England), March 24, 2008, p. 49.