Jours de famine et de détresse: roman

A cold winter day becomes a vivid mirror for the narrator, who watches children sliding on the snow while a rag‑clad boy is pushed, beaten and left to crawl away in tears. The incident awakens memories of his own brother Kees, whose “sensual” tears once seemed as clear as morning dew, and it underlines how poverty turns simple play into cruel exclusion. From this window the narrator relives the bitter episodes of a bleak childhood, where every moment of joy is shadowed by hunger and humiliation.

The family portrait is equally stark. Their father, a tall, lanky Frisian with a bright tenor voice, fills evenings with song and stories of his soldier past, offering a fleeting sanctuary around the hearth. Their mother, a Liège‑born woman obsessed with finery yet trapped in want, flits between generosity and pretension, dressing the children in borrowed splendor while secretly longing for a better life. These contradictions set the stage for a story that explores how love, loss and social hardship shape a young mind in the early years of the twentieth‑century winter.