While the Gods Were Sleeping

“Mortier is superb . . . The push and pull of ugliness and beauty Helena witnessed plays into her conviction about humanity’s random and godless state of existence, as the title suggests: ‘give us back our mealy-mouthed petit-bourgeois world,’ she writes, knowing that such comforts have been stripped from her. . . [an] ultimately poised consideration of war’s long impact on feeling and faith.”
—Kirkus Reviews
 
“Like Michael Ondaatje and Anne Michaels, Erwin Mortier, the 49-year old Flemish writer whose four novels have just been published in North America, is a poetic prose artist. Unlike Ondaatje and Michaels, whose stock has fallen rather sharply in the last decade, Mortier writes stories that stick and characters whose oblique relationship to normalcy lodge themselves in our minds like splinters . . . a quintessential and literally definitive work of Belgian literature.”
—The National Post

“A beautifully unorthodox novel of the Great War . . . a kaleidoscopic palette.”
—Independent
 
“Almost too beautiful a writer . . . the footprint of Proust visible on every page.”
—Financial Times
 
“Sumptuously imagined.”
—Independent, Best Translated Fiction 2014