The Sorrow of Belgium

In 1939, Louis Seynaeve, a ten-year-old Flemish student, is chiefly occupied with schoolboy adventures and lurid adolescent fantasies. Then the Nazis invade Belgium, and he grows up fast. Bewildered by his family—a stuffy father who welcomes the occupation and a flirtatious mother who works for (and plays with) the Germans—he is seemingly at the center of so much he can't understand. Gradually, as he confronts the horrors of the war and its aftermath, the eccentric and often petty behavior of hi…