Read our sample translation of While the Gods Were Sleeping
Rights sold
- Pushkin Press (UK)
- Fayard (France)
- Acantilado (Spain)
- DuMont (Germany)
- Alakarga (Turkey)
About the book
Sensing death’s approach, an old woman looks back on her childhood, her loves, her marriage and the years during the First World War that she spent in France with her mother and brother. What gradually arises is an intimate panorama of Belgium. With no desire to emphasize one event more than another, she longs for an endless sentence “that absorbs everything there is, like a lady-in-waiting from the days of wigs, an armada of pearls capsizing in her locks, lifting her countless skirts as she climbs the stairs at the opera – or the rungs to the gallows.”
While the Gods Were Sleeping, Erwin Mortier’s fifth novel, takes place at the intersection of history’s great events and the little lives of humans, the meeting place between language and the world, imagination and reality, between the writing of history and narrative prose.
