Writing duo Elvis Peeters wins the Ultima for Literature: ‘A friend sent me a text message saying that our book made him throw up’

“You can’t get a better compliment, can you?” responds Nicole Van Bael, the female half of writing duo Elvis Peeters, when I quote a sentence from the jury report of the Ultima that she has just received. ‘Their work is always committed and challenges people to think about current and important themes,’ it says. “A book must indeed be relevant to us,” her husband Jos Verlooy – the other half of Elvis Peeters – agrees. “You have to say something about the times you live in, about being involved in your society.”

For more than thirty years, Van Bael and Verlooy have been writing an oeuvre that consists of stories, novels, plays, poetry and children’s books. The series that can be viewed on Ketnet Mr. Paper is one of their creations, just like the children’s book that recently won the Boon Audience Award Then look!illustrated by Sebastiaan Van Doninck.

Although it would perhaps be better to say intellectual ping-pong instead of writing, because Elvis Peeters appears to be a creature that arises from action and reaction. The two writers each work separately, forward pieces of text to each other and then continue to work on them. The starting point and theme are fixed, but they do not have a line. They will see where they end up, and that can sometimes cause complications, as Verlooy explains: “We were once asked by a theater company if we wanted to write a play for them. They received subsidies based on a synopsis. But of course we couldn’t deliver that. So we wrote the piece first and then turned it into a synopsis, hoping it would be approved. Which, fortunately, happened.”

In recent decades, Elvis Peeters not only guaranteed committed literature, their books often also proved to be particularly visionary. For example, what to think of their first major success, The countless (2005), in which the refugee crisis was central at a time when such a crisis did not yet exist? Or from The surrounding areas (2019), a novel about the widening gap between city and countryside, which they saw becoming reality, so to speak, when the yellow vests took to the streets?

And then there is We (2009) of course, the book that hit like a bomb, about eight young people who, out of boredom, indulge in the grossest immoralities, who encourage a man to jump from the roof and laughingly call him a loser whenever he does it, who prostitute themselves, have a wasp sting a clitoris and penetrate a girl with an icicle until she dies.

“Nobody really thought about the possibility of a refugee crisis at the time,” Van Bael remembers about the process of creating it The countless. “We didn’t start it with the idea of ​​writing a refugee novel. There were two things that stimulated us. The first was the distant poverty that everyone saw on their TV screen. What if we cut that distance away, we thought, so that there are no people starving in the Sahel, but there are people starving on your own doorstep. What does something like that do to a person? The second was what happened in a Turkish-Kurdish village during the Iraq war. It was quickly overrun by Iraqi refugees, causing the local population to suddenly become a minority.”

Verlooy: “A study was also published at the time which showed that if everyone wanted the same level of prosperity as in Belgium, we would need four earths. So that was impossible, but of course everyone would want that, we thought, so all those people would come to the north in search of a better life.”

Typical of your writing style is that you do not take a moral position, not even in The countless. The reader has to figure it out for himself?

Van Bael: “We don’t want to take our readers by the hand and say: this is the problem and this is how you should look at it. Then you underestimate them. You want them to think for themselves. A novel is not a pamphlet.”

That moral neutrality is yours after the publication of We resented by many. Did that book go too far?

Verlooy: “We were indeed hurled at many accusations: how dirty it was to write such a book and how perverse what was going on in our heads. But the amazing thing is that we had to come up with almost nothing. Everything just came from the media. That man who committed suicide under much encouragement was simply reported in the newspaper.

“The young people in our book lived the story given to them by the previous generation. If you grow up in a world where only the economy is important, you are exposed to something amoral: you do what you can and you do not feel responsible for it. What we showed was nothing different from what you see every day in the City of London. We have only extended that to the social level.”

Van Bael: “Is We a horrible book? Of course, but we only held a mirror up to the readers. A friend sent me a text one morning that he had been reading all night long Weuntil it got light and he turned the last page and had to puke. I can imagine that, although shocking was not our goal. For me, those responses were the clearest proof that showing certain things is enough to make people think. And I still think that is the most important thing.

“We were mainly blamed for writing about middle-class youth without any drinking or poverty problem. Because you always see that, frenzied behavior due to drugs. But that was not our concern, but rather the lack of morality and sense of responsibility in contemporary society.”

The tension between individual and community, and what happens to the individual when that community disappears, is a constant in Elvis Peeters’ work. Also in their novel published last year The times. We follow farmer Emiel, who from the 1970s onwards saw traditional, small-scale agriculture making way for the industry aimed at higher returns under the European Mansholt Plan. Emiel has a daughter, Hannelore, who starts out as a revolutionary punk, but grows into the manager of her own London marketing agency. And Hannelore in turn has a son, Matteo, who is somewhat lost in the contemporary world, suddenly converts to extreme right-wing identity politics and wants to lead an autonomous life in nature with his girlfriend and his crossbow.

Verlooy: “In the early 1980s we saw the shrinking of the midfield happening before our eyes. It was the time of the Citizen manifestos by Guy Verhofstadt, who promoted a direct link between citizens and the government. Club life no longer served any purpose. From now on, the individual himself would be heard through plebiscites. But that individual ultimately had no say. It was ground between the wheels of power.

“Since our work is so close to society, it is almost logical that the contrast between individual and community is discussed. When you follow the media, you get the impression that politicians have a lot to say – ‘The government needs to be degreased,’ or ‘more money needs to be spent on defence’ – but ultimately a lot is decided by companies, and they are not democratic. Whoever has the most shares has the loudest voice, which can be compared to nineteenth-century tax suffrage.

“For example, I find it striking that many things that radically change our lives are never discussed. Are we going to introduce mobile phones or continue to work with a landline? That was never talked about. Companies offer what they want and then society has to solve it. We are controlled by algorithms that serve companies. Politics has, to a great extent, relinquished power.”

But how do you get it back? How do you stimulate social solidarity?

Verlooy: “Because the civil society has crumbled, groups of like-minded people are coming together more often. Take, for example, people who know each other from the tennis club. That’s a certain part of the population. They can be very supportive of each other, but to what extent are they also supportive of others? I experienced broader solidarity in the football canteen, when our son was still playing football. There you get a broader cross-section of society. There are not really any Flemish Belangers in our circle of friends, but you do meet them in the football canteen. It looks much more like the midfield of the past.”

Van Bael: “A canteen like this is proof that social cohesion is still possible, but we have to want to break out of our niche. There are still community-building initiatives. Together with two hundred others, we revived the Hnita Jazz Club in Heist-op-den-Berg, the plumber next to the IT person, the housewife next to the writer. We purchased the building together and completely renovated it and we now organize more than eighty concerts a year. A lot of really good things are happening. You just have to want to see it and participate in it. I am sure that this will bring people closer together and, in the long run, will promote confidence in our institutions and the justice system.”

Even Robinson Crusoe needed his Friday, you once said.

Verlooy: “It is indeed an illusion that you could exist on your own. We are social beings. A person only becomes a person by coming into contact with other people, through the gaze of the other, as the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas said. Pure individualism leads to nothing, because then you are no longer human.”