Nate D's Reviews > Bruges-La-Morte

The morbid obsession of an inconsolable bereavement, and the dual mapping of that loss onto city streets, fog-bound and empty, and onto a new living object, innocent of the simulacrum she's been forced to become. Or the book doesn't really see her as innocent, casting her as a somewhat blandly archetypal manipulative harlot, but really who wouldn't fair poorly under the projected image of a lover who is unable to see her at all behind the other he has lost? Still, the streets of Bruges have a slow-burning mystery here, and a well-wrought background of fanatical Catholic disapproval that builds to fever in the culminating Holy Blood procession. Eerie and poetic, this was a key text of the Belgian Symbolists, admired by Huysmans and Mallarme with obvious cause.

Incidentally, this edition was published by Atlas Press, committed translators and reissuers of so many otherwise lost surrealist, symbolist, and dada texts. Their edition also reproduces Rodenbach's photos of Bruges, as they appeared in the original publication. Symbolist painter Fernand Knopff, also of Bruges, did the original frontispiece, and later did his own versions, ghostly and elegaic, of several of the photos: