Herman Brusselmans: 'In my head I am not a bourgeois dick'

Either you love him or you hate him: Herman Brusselmans. With an average of two novels a year, the Flemish writer has built up a huge and unique oeuvre in over thirty-five years - he turns 63 this week, but the number of books he has written far exceeds that number. Interview with the man who writes faster than his shadow, in ten quiz questions. 'Well, I don't appear to be a connoisseur of my own work, do I?'

For hardcore fans, Herman Brusselmans' output is already hard to keep up with. But would Brusselmans himself still know what he has written? We find out soon enough, as we have arranged to meet at the author's home in Ghent for a quiz interview. 'So,' says Brusselmans, as he sits down with a thud on the sofa and dog Eddie happily trips around the room. Throwing his long hair over his shoulder, he lights a fag. 'Question one.'

OK, here comes the first quote from one of your novels:

'Since becoming a writer, I have not known a night without at least five hundred thoughts.' Herman Brusselmans - Possible Memoirs (2013)

'Um... Ex-writer? No? Well, it's also one sentence among a hundred thousand, eh. Few write as much as I do. I am called a compulsive writer, but that is not correct - I am a fast writer. What I do, I enjoy doing and every day. Then you get a body of work. But to call that compulsive... If I were on a desert island without a pen and paper, would I write poems in the sand with a stick? Probably not. No one needs to suffer because of my writing, I don't need to be left alone, like: sir is writing.

I write at night, when everyone else is asleep, and work until seven in the morning. At night, it feels like you're alone in the world, and that gives you certain thoughts and musings. But when my girlfriend of 24 is around, I feel comfortable not writing for two nights. The need to write diminishes by the day. Should the very autobiographical book I'm working on now go unwritten, that won't be a disaster.'

'Exceptions aside of course, exceptions aside.'Herman Brusselmans - Senseless Sailing

 

'That's the first sentence of the collection of stories Senseless sailing, my debut. A book that already contained the seeds of what I would do later. Some writers are ashamed of their early work and forbid it to be reprinted, but I didn't. Not that it was all that fantastic, but I was thirty-five years younger and that was what I could do then. Now I can do other things, though many people still find my third book The man who found work the best.

In my childhood, I did not come into contact with books. My father was a cattle trader, there was hard work day and night. Buying and selling cattle, slaughterhouses, that made up my world. It was only when I went to college that I came into contact with books and started reading like crazy. My first manuscript, Senseless sailing, I sent to a small publisher. After a year, a postcard came: "We're going to do it, come to Haarlem to talk." If they hadn't published it, I might not even have become a writer. I'm not someone who goes ten times fruitlessly trying to achieve something.'

 'There are three main things: the past, literature and love.'Herman Brusselmans - The Mistakes

 

'Yes. Um... That's pretty much in every book, I think. Is that Poppy and Eddie and Manon? The errors, you say? Ah. Well, I'm already a few books down the road.

The past, literature and love are the three things I build my existence on. The literature I do now, the love is there now. But the past, it's not there now, but then again it is. You can't write off the past, you can write things down. The fact that I write helps - not what I write. My own life is the closest material. I have tried writing a science fiction novel once, or a novel set during World War II, but that feels fake. There has to be a link to my own reality.'

'Moved, the idol to many decided to conclude this chapter and sharpen his pen for the next chapter with which he would prove once again, if necessary, that Dutch-language literature could not survive without him.' Herman Brusselmans - The Dollar Signs in Mother Theresa's Eyes

'Is that The kiss in the night? O, The dollar signs in Mother Theresa's eyes. When you are young, you still think your book will change literature, change the world. I've lost that, though. No book has ever changed anything. Jan Wolkers did not bring about the great sexual revolution; he started writing in a climate where that was possible. A hundred thousand people may once have thought that Turkish fruit changed their lives, but that does not mean the book changed society. The only books that really mean anything in this respect are the Bible and the Koran - which, in turn, are often used without anyone having read them.

Tom Lanoye, Kristien Hemmerechts and I - the gay, the straight and the female - may have dusted off literature in our early days, but I never considered myself as a writer to have a voice in society. A newspaper will occasionally ask me what I think about something, but they also ask the blonde singer of K3.'

'It was the smell of death and horror with a tiny hint of sweaty pussy in it.' Herman Brusselmans - From three to six

'Hmm. Autobiography of someone else. No. I do appear to be a connoisseur of my own work, eh. I am completely wrong every time. The explicit in my work has repelled people, absolutely. You write "cunt" and "dick" and people stumble over that. But then I say: read Marquis De Sade from the eighteenth century - everything you can find vulgar or vulgar is already in there. It's not exactly innovative to write "cunt" and "dick". To me, those are just as common words as "table".

Many people are sexually frustrated and feel shame about sex. I don't struggle with that at all. I am the only one in Flanders who has ever admitted that I use Viagra because I have erectile dysfunction. The other day, a man of sixty-five and two hundred and fifty kilos, who was sweating all the time and looked totally unhealthy, said: 'I still have no problems getting it straight.' That man does have problems getting it straight, I'm sure. Viagra is about the best-selling drug in the world. By the way, I have discovered a new product, Vivanza, which is much better.'

'Silence me about the Marie Claire, in it one of my books My father used to say: help your mother wash the dishes, was particularly badly reviewed. If I ever run into that reviewer, I'll break her legs.'Herman Brusselmans - Muggepuut

'Muggepuut! So this is a character saying that, hey, I didn't write this because a book of mine was once in the Marie Claire poorly reviewed - which may be true, but I don't know.

Critics have always commented on my work. After thirty-five years, I really can't lose sleep over reviews. I don't want to sound blasé, but it doesn't matter anymore, doesn't affect sales at all. My work has never been nominated for an award. Not that I care, well, except for that 50,000 euros. Never before has a funny book won a major award. When you see what books win those awards, it's all so well behaved, so serious, so... mainstream. But in the words of Liberace, "I'm crying all the way to the bank." I'd rather earn enough with my pussy literature than get a good review in de Volkskrant.'

'Enough laughter. Life is seriousness and beyond that, life is nothing.' Herman Brusselmans - My hair is long

'Um, Beautiful eyes? Wrong again. Enough laughter, life is serious... Life ís serious. People and babies are being shot in Syria. You have to get that off your back by being silly, by bullshitting, by thinking and writing absurdly. In my daily life, I am an incredible civic dick. I pay my taxes neatly, am friendly and help old ladies across the street. But in my head, I am not a bourgeois. I live by absurdity, laugh at everything and think every joke should be allowed. That's my weapon, my buffer against all the shit that happens.'

This one is bound to succeed:

'Broekgat (...) was also reading, in a novel by Harry Mulisch. From the look on his face, he thought it was just a dirty, immoral, disapproving, tedious and badly written novel.Herman Brusselmans - Zeik

'That comes from one of the Zeik-books, the first, I guess. I love pisces. I now even have a weekly column in the New Review about overrated people, in which I write, for example, that a potted plant acts even better than Carice van Houten. People like Matthijs van Nieuwkerk and Nelson Mandela have been covered, and myself once. I like to piss on monuments. I don't always mean what I write, but lesser gods who take themselves incredibly seriously sometimes feel peeved.'

'Lonely divorce, no house, no car, no dog and only money in my pockets for a few cups of coffee.' Herman Brusselmans - The Drought

'My ex-wife Tania left me in 2010, so what could that be... Um.... A day in Ghent? No? Surely I thought this was autobiographical. The drought is a favourite book for many people. I remember thick books best, such as The kiss in the night - more than six hundred pages - and above all Poppy and Eddie and Manon. There is all my soul and my heart and my blood in that, I erected a statue to a woman, elevated her to a goddess.

But the woman who modelled that, my former girlfriend Melissa, thinks it's terrible. It was one of the reasons our relationship broke up. It was a love novel, a monument to her, but she felt I threw her private life out on the street. Tania, Poppy in this book, on the other hand, has always greatly appreciated me writing about her. She is still my first reader.

Love, and being in a relationship, I think is about being interested in the other person in all areas. So not just sexually, but also: what is the person doing? That ended up costing me all my relationships, including my marriage to Tania, because those women felt suffocated. If my wife went to the toilet and she stayed away a little longer, I was already shouting, "Where are you?" On the one hand, they might be right, but on the other, I also think: what tar-faced pussies you actually are. You have a man who does everything for you and lives only for you, and then it's not right either.

Well, one more then:

'Another million steps, I thought, and I'm home.' Herman Brusselmans - Beautiful eyes

'That's the last sentence of something, huh. That might well be my debut novel Beautiful eyes could be. Many of my books ended with: "I'm home" or "I hear the key in the lock" and then Tania came home or the character based on her. Now "home" for me is this space, with me alone in it. See, there are two worlds: my world and the rest of the world. I look for people who can live on my planet and there are incredibly few of them. Even Tania, the one I thought would stay on my planet forever, left after 20 years. Well, she didn't leave my planet, but is now on the other side.

Ninety per cent of friends and acquaintances said: it's no wonder she left him, he's an incredibly difficult man to live with. But what the fuck do they know about what it's like to live with me? Besides, it's not true. I am the easiest man to live with, as long as you give me the chance to give love.'