The best known books set in each country: Belgium

Ending the year with my adopted home country. For those of you who are new to this, I’m going through every country in the world, trying to identify the best known books set there (or at least more than half set there).

See here for methodology. Books are disqualified if less than 50% of them is set in Belgium.

These numbers are crunched by hand, not by AI.

Title	Author	Goodreads raters	LibraryThing owners
Villette	Charlotte Brontë	80,023	9,720
The Lady and the Unicorn	Tracy Chevalier	47,371	5,018
The Secret of the Unicorn	Hergé	18,003	2,252
The Seven Crystal Balls	Hergé	15,121	1,970
The Warm Hands of Ghosts	Katherine Arden	29,935	934
The Castafiore Emerald	Hergé	12,026	1,982
Hygiene and the Assassin	Amélie Nothomb	18,793	1,239
The Misfortunates	Dimitri Verhulst	15,232	989

(Note a couple of unicorns in there.)

There are a couple of these which aren’t explicitly set in Belgium, but I am allowing them for reasons that I will explain. This week’s winner, Villette, is set in the eponymous fictional city, capital of the small fictional country of Labassecour. But there can be no doubt in the minds of any informed reader that Villette is Brussels and Labassecour is Belgium. The protagonist comes to the city to teach in a girls’ school and has an unhappy romantic adventure; this is drawn from Charlotte Brontë’s own experience in the 1840s. In her first novel The Professor, published only after her death, she is more explicit about the setting and more lyrical:

Belgium! name unromantic and unpoetic, yet name that whenever uttered has in my ear a sound, in my heart an echo, such as no other assemblage of syllables, however sweet or classic, can produce. Belgium! I repeat the word, now as I sit alone near midnight.

The other book on the list where a bit of special pleading may be required is Amélie Nothomb’s first novel, Hygiene and the Assassin, in which a dying writer gives obnoxious interviews to journalists in his apartment. Most readers assume that the apartment is in Paris, but no explicit Parisian cue is given. On the other hand, I note the following passage (on page 37 of the English translation):

Il y a des publicités à n’en plus finir, surtout des publicités alimentaires. Je zappe de manière à me constituer la séquence publicitaire la plus longue du monde: avec les seize chaînes européennes, il est tout à fait possible, en zappant intelligemment d’avoir une demi-heure de réclames sans interruption. C’est un merveilleux opéra multilingue: le shampooing hollandais, les biscuits italiens, la lessive biologique allemande, le beurre français, etc. Je me régale.

There are endless amounts of commercials, primarily about food. I channel surf in order to put together the longest sequence of commercials on earth: with the sixteen European channels, it is perfectly feasible, if you surf intelligently, to get a full half-hour of uninterrupted commercials. It’s a marvelous multilingual opera: Dutch shampoo, Italian cookies, German organic washing powder, French butter, and so on. What a treat.

(Note that “to channel surf” in French is “zapper”.)

Now, I ask you, if you were a French person in France, would you identify French butter as such, in that way, fourth in a list of products from other countries? To adapt a line from Friends, in France they just call it ‘butter’. I think that the protagonist’s apartment is in Europe but not in France, and given Nothomb’s Belgian roots, it’s more likely to be in Belgium than anywhere else. Dutch shampoo is less likely to be found in Geneva or Lausanne; and we are told that the protagonist speaks no language other than French, which means that he cannot be from Luxembourg, where all schoolchildren are fluent in at least three languages before they leave elementary school.

I disqualified a lot of books this time. Top of the list were Cloud Atlas, by David Mitchell, and Vanity Fair, by William Makepeace Thackeray, both of which have memorable passages set in Belgium but for much less than 50% of the book. I scratched my head for some time about I Who Have Never Known Men, by Jacqueline Harpman, but decided in the end that the blasted and desolate landscape in which her protagonist finds herself doesn’t really fit a Belgian setting, even post-apocalypse. King Leopold’s Ghost, by Adam Hochschild, was on my DR Congo list last year, because it is about Congo and what Belgians did there. I disqualified two of Amélie Nothomb’s other books, Fear and Loathing and The Character of Rain, because they are set in Japan. And Marguerite Yourcenar’s Memories of Hadrian has no connection with Belgium, apart from the birthplace of its author.

On top of that, I disqualified seventeen of the twenty classic Tintin books by Hergé because they are not set in Belgium. But The Secret of the Unicorn and The Seven Crystal Balls are; they are both first parts of two-part stories, where our hero and friends prepare at home for the adventures concluded respectively in Red Rackham’s Treasure (set at sea) and Prisoners of the Sun (set in Peru); and also The Castafiore Emerald, with all its eccentricities, is definitely set not just in Belgium but in Captain Haddock’s home, Marlinspike Manor.

When I did this calculation in 2015, I got much the same answer, though I’m also just going to note that The Warm Hands of Ghosts, by Katherine Arden, is scoring very well, especially on Goodreads, for a book that was only published last year.

Coming in 2026: Jordan, the Dominican Republic, the United Arab Emirates and Honduras.

From the Heart of Europe

Books, politics, languages and life

The best known books set in each country: Belgium

Related

Share this:

Related