Philippe Dutilleul can think of as many reasons to love Belgium as he can find excuses to hate it. The nation’s disintegration saddens him. In this book, he paints a sardonic portrait of a country where nothing runs exactly the way it should, and where people are used to “working things out.” A country that is undermined not only by secessionist conflicts and quarrels between the two language groups, but also by a history of racketeering, fraud, and never fully elucidated scandals, like the Dutroux case, or the Walloon-Brabant killers…
The director of the caustic “Tout ça ne nous rendra pas la Belgique” (None of that will give us Belgium back”) stigmatizes the listlessness of public opinion, manipulated by certain politicians’ ambitions and put to sleep by others’ mediocrity. He treats Walloon ostriches and Flemish hawks with equal disdain. He loses his temper over a country that is falling into a sort of cultural-linguistic apartheid. He rails at a workaday king who doesn’t have the charisma of his own father, or of a Juan Carlos of Spain.
And yet, he assures us, the Kingdom of Belgium could be marvelous. The land of Rubens, Ensor and Magritte, of Jacque Brel and Hugo Claus, the Dardennes brothers and Jacko van Dormel, of Frankin and Geluck has no shortage of talent or humor. Belgium, Dutilleul writes, is also an art de vivre, an amiability, a kind of simplicity… you could even say a taste for the burlesque that thinks its French neighbor’s superiority complex is funny.