THE REMEMBERED SOLDIER
ANJET DAANJE (tr. David McKay)
New Vessel Press (non-affiliate Bookshop.org link)
$22.95 all editions, available now
Rating:
A New York Times 100 Notable Books of 2025 selection
One of LitHub's 100 Notable Small Press Books for 2025!
Wall Street Journal's The 10 Best Books of 2025
The Publisher Says: An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination.
Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth? In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatized man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest of literature can achieve.
I RECEIVED A DRC FROM THE PUBLISHER VIA EDELWEISS+. THANK YOU.
My Review: Deeply satisfying, immersive, emotionally intense, and really long.
Okay. You can go buy one now. Ebook, trade paper, whatever, the choice is yours on format. Reading it ought not to be a choice not to.
Maybe this is the last time he will walk down the familiar corridor as the man called Noon Merckem, that door there on the left with those welcoming panes of glass could mean the end of his existence, weak in the knees like a man being dragged to the gallows, that's how he feels in this instant, as the hope that sustained him, the certainty that everything would be new and better beyond imagining and normal at last, that he would pass through that everyday door and be another man when he came out, a man with a home and a family and a life outside these walls, all drains away. And he comes to a halt on the sun-dappled tiles and Brother Reginald turns toward him and sees the desperation on his face and murmurs that God will never test Noon more harshly than he can bear, and gives an encouraging nod, and Noon remains silent, because in his four years here he has not seen much to reassure him about God's notions of what is bearable.
The ecstatic terror of being someone..."this is what it is like to be someone"...who belongs to someone, who is known to someone, whose voice and habits and smells aren't case notes but facts of a shared life...permeates Noon (Amand now) from every axis and angle. Julienne is now real. He has a wife and she not only knows him but wants him (unlike other men in the asylum whose wives families whoevers do not have strength to bear them up) back with her and their children (children? oh god) to create anew the life that war stole from them all. But here are losses too, what is to become of Basiel his electively mute buddy? what of Maurice Constant Jules? and this is where Julienne becomes, to my mind, the single luckiest person on this planet to rediscover a man she was amazingly lucky to find in the first place. He (Amand) has room in his hour of grace bestowed to care for and about those he will leave to become someone, restored to life, to his life again. At last. But the men he leaves in the asylum? Only in body. They're still with him.
Bodies. How incredibly important bodies are in, and after, war breaks them. A body is a thing we use to carry our memories that grow our feelings and shape our personas. All of those are plurals. Plurality and duality and dichotomy are the lot of all bodies, most especially as we move them through...whatever time is, listen if the physics geniuses assembled at Solvay in Belgium a mere five years after this book takes place didn't have a clue what time *is* what chance do I have...time, and things happen to around in us. Children, for example, happen. How? "The usual way" glibly tossed off, but how usual is any way?
What makes me so very happy as I re-experience this story after abandoning it back in March, stuck in my hate-fog as Felonious Yam and cronies began their assault on us, only to pick it up on Thursday morning and finish all close-to-six-hundred pages on Friday afternoon, is the respect for my intelligence this book embodies from beginning to end. Julienne never once comes across as anything other than sincere, Amand never steps into any role but the one of honorable man, no one tells me what to think of their foibles, failings, fallings-short.
What I look for, every time I pick out a story to read, is the one that will make it impossible for me to do the ordinary thing, find faults, even ones that normal people wouldn't care about, and instead surrender to the story's currents and tides, falling in falling down falling in love.
That's what happened here. I hope you'll follow me, hope you'll have that experience, hope this read will fulfill you the way it did me.
I'll note that Goodreads has hundreds of Flemish-language reviews that award four and five stars.
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