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Other People's Countries: A Journey into Memory
Winner of the 2014 Duff Cooper Prize
Winner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year Award
Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prize
Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize
Let me take you down the thin cobblestoned streets of the Belgian border town of Bouillon. Let me take you down the alleys that lead into its past. To a town peopled with eccentrics, full of charm, menace and wonder. To the days before television, to Marie Bodard’s sweetshop, to the Nazi occupation and unexpected collaborators. To a place where one neighbour murders another over the misfortune of pigs and potatoes. To the hotel where the French poet Verlaine his lover Rimbaud, holed up whilst on the run from family, creditors and the law.
This exquisite meditation on place, time and memory is an illicit peek into other people’s countries, into the spaces they have populated with their memories, and might just make you revisit your own in a new and surprising way.
Winner of the 2015 Welsh Book of the Year Award
Shortlisted for the 2015 James Tait Black Memorial Prize
Shortlisted for the 2015 PEN Ackerley prize
Longlisted for the 2014 Thwaites Wainwright Prize
Let me take you down the thin cobblestoned streets of the Belgian border town of Bouillon. Let me take you down the alleys that lead into its past. To a town peopled with eccentrics, full of charm, menace and wonder. To the days before television, to Marie Bodard’s sweetshop, to the Nazi occupation and unexpected collaborators. To a place where one neighbour murders another over the misfortune of pigs and potatoes. To the hotel where the French poet Verlaine his lover Rimbaud, holed up whilst on the run from family, creditors and the law.
This exquisite meditation on place, time and memory is an illicit peek into other people’s countries, into the spaces they have populated with their memories, and might just make you revisit your own in a new and surprising way.
208 pages, Paperback
First published February 6, 2014
8 people are currently reading
277 people want to read
About the author
Patrick McGuinness
53 books69 followersBorn in Tunisia in 1968 to a Belgian French-speaking mother and an English father of Irish descent, he grew up in Belgium and also lived for periods in Venezuela, Iran, Romania and the UK. He currently lives in Oxford and in Wales teaching French and Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews
April 26, 2020
It’s strangely difficult to find quintessential Belgian reads. I’ve been to Belgium twice now and, both times, failing to find Belgium-relevant material (since I don’t read crime fiction or series, I wouldn’t be interested in a Simenon mystery), have had to make do with more general European reading, or choose books set in surrounding countries. For example, on our first trip in 2012 I read a Dutch novel (The Twin by Gerbrand Bakker) and a thriller set in Luxembourg (The Expats). In 2017, when we combined Belgium and the Netherlands, I picked up another Bakker novel (The Detour) plus historical fiction set in Amsterdam (Tulip Fever) and an Austrian’s novella.
If only by that later trip I’d known about this book, which first came out in 2014! It’s a wonderfully atmospheric tribute to Bouillon, Belgium, a Wallonian border town with its own patois. However, it’s chiefly a memoir about the maternal side of the author’s family, which had lived there for generations. McGuinness grew up spending summers in Bouillon with his grandparents and aunt. Returning to the place as an adult, he finds it half-derelict but still storing memories around every corner.
This is as much a tour through memory as through a town, reflecting on how our memories are bound up with particular sites and objects – to the extent that I don’t think I would find McGuinness’ Bouillon even if I went back to Belgium. “When I’m asked about events in my childhood, about my childhood at all, I think mostly of rooms. I think of times as places, with walls and windows and doors,” he writes. The book is also about the nature of time: Bouillon seems like a place where time stands still or moves more slowly, allowing its residents (including his grandfather, and Paprika, “Bouillon’s laziest man, who held a party to celebrate sixty years on the dole”) a position of smug idleness.
Recently I’ve been more drawn to memoirs that experiment with form. I’ve read so many autobiographical narratives at this point that, if it’s to stand out for me, a book has to do something different, such as employ a second-person POV and/or a structure of linked essays. This is in short vignettes, some as short as a paragraph; each is a separate piece with a title that remembers a particular place, event or local character. Some are poems and there are also recipes and an inventory. The whole is illustrated with frequent period or contemporary black-and-white photographs. It’s an altogether lovely book that overcomes its narrow local interest to say something about how the past remains alive for us.
Favorite lines:
“Some days I become a factory for sad thoughts: the night shift starts not when I go to bed, but when I decide to go to bed.”
“that hybrid long-finished but real-time-unfolding present tense that reflects the inside of our lives far better than those three stooges, the past, present and future”
“Being half-Belgian does not disqualify me from that slightly adrift sense of belonging that constitutes Belgitude, because all Belgians are only half-Belgian.”
a fantastic last line: “What I want to say is: I misremember all this so vividly it’s as if it only happened yesterday.”
If only by that later trip I’d known about this book, which first came out in 2014! It’s a wonderfully atmospheric tribute to Bouillon, Belgium, a Wallonian border town with its own patois. However, it’s chiefly a memoir about the maternal side of the author’s family, which had lived there for generations. McGuinness grew up spending summers in Bouillon with his grandparents and aunt. Returning to the place as an adult, he finds it half-derelict but still storing memories around every corner.
This is as much a tour through memory as through a town, reflecting on how our memories are bound up with particular sites and objects – to the extent that I don’t think I would find McGuinness’ Bouillon even if I went back to Belgium. “When I’m asked about events in my childhood, about my childhood at all, I think mostly of rooms. I think of times as places, with walls and windows and doors,” he writes. The book is also about the nature of time: Bouillon seems like a place where time stands still or moves more slowly, allowing its residents (including his grandfather, and Paprika, “Bouillon’s laziest man, who held a party to celebrate sixty years on the dole”) a position of smug idleness.
Recently I’ve been more drawn to memoirs that experiment with form. I’ve read so many autobiographical narratives at this point that, if it’s to stand out for me, a book has to do something different, such as employ a second-person POV and/or a structure of linked essays. This is in short vignettes, some as short as a paragraph; each is a separate piece with a title that remembers a particular place, event or local character. Some are poems and there are also recipes and an inventory. The whole is illustrated with frequent period or contemporary black-and-white photographs. It’s an altogether lovely book that overcomes its narrow local interest to say something about how the past remains alive for us.
Favorite lines:
“Some days I become a factory for sad thoughts: the night shift starts not when I go to bed, but when I decide to go to bed.”
“that hybrid long-finished but real-time-unfolding present tense that reflects the inside of our lives far better than those three stooges, the past, present and future”
“Being half-Belgian does not disqualify me from that slightly adrift sense of belonging that constitutes Belgitude, because all Belgians are only half-Belgian.”
a fantastic last line: “What I want to say is: I misremember all this so vividly it’s as if it only happened yesterday.”
May 18, 2015
Events owe their existence to memories more than memories owe their existence to events. Most of my childhhood feels more real to me now than it did then.
This is uneven, but overall a very atmospheric and moody evocation of the Belgian half of the author’s heritage.
Having just read about how Belgium suffered in WWI, it was dismaying to read about more adversity in WWII. But since that came before McGuinness was born, the war events had an extra layer of the kind of film that gathers on old, unwashed windows, through which all the memories here are filtered. Most of the memories are of McGuiness’s childhood in this old, semi-rural former factory town. It is now more of a tourist attraction than a true community, it seems. But he writes perceptively of citizens who, the the twentieth century, led blended lives of country and machinery:
McGuinness makes the sixties and seventies seem more like the 30s and 40s to me, in the narrow lanes, taverns, home businesses, local ‘characters’ and interwoven families. He was the product of a local girl who met an Englishman at university, and McGuinness ended up the child of diplomats posted to global hotspots (e.g. Iran) while he boarded at English schools. But he, his parents and sister intermittently dropped back into the past and deep family when they returned to visit the Belgian village. He still keeps the family house as a summer retreat, along with the ghosts of the grandparents, aunts and uncles he remembers here.
Starting from fragments of the physical past like old photographs, faint trails where railroad trcks once ran, and empty windows, McGuiness ponders the vagaries that mean each fragment calls forth a particular version of the ‘actual’ past. He also writes indirect, inherited memories of the famous who have links to Bouillon and its region: Verlaine and Rimbaud, Simone Signoret in a film that was shot in the town, and the unrepentent Belgian Nazi Degrelle. Because at its heart the book is about how we construct our memories, and whether we are contained by them or they fall away. McGuiness is contained.
The book consists of dozens of one to five page vignettes or musings. Some strain too hard for artful language, and at times it felt too long to be so deliberately attentuated on every page. But other chapters really take off and are quite wonderful. I particuarly enjoyed ‘Lining’, ‘Angelty’ and ‘Afterword’.
This is uneven, but overall a very atmospheric and moody evocation of the Belgian half of the author’s heritage.
Having just read about how Belgium suffered in WWI, it was dismaying to read about more adversity in WWII. But since that came before McGuinness was born, the war events had an extra layer of the kind of film that gathers on old, unwashed windows, through which all the memories here are filtered. Most of the memories are of McGuiness’s childhood in this old, semi-rural former factory town. It is now more of a tourist attraction than a true community, it seems. But he writes perceptively of citizens who, the the twentieth century, led blended lives of country and machinery:
What made Hinaux the typical Bouillonnais, and typical too of a certain kind of life and culture, was that mix of industrial and rural that you get in small factory towns, or in places where heavy industry has been hewn out of nature, They’re factory-glades amid the green. He was part of that movement from the soil to the assembly-line, except that there was no movement because the assembly line came, then went, and the soil stayed. Like my grandfather and all those who worked in the factories in Bouillon and elsewhere, they had the habits of the country: they trapped animals and ate them, fished, kept chickens and pigs in their yards, and grew vegetables with a skill that was muted and bleak and uninterested in itself.
McGuinness makes the sixties and seventies seem more like the 30s and 40s to me, in the narrow lanes, taverns, home businesses, local ‘characters’ and interwoven families. He was the product of a local girl who met an Englishman at university, and McGuinness ended up the child of diplomats posted to global hotspots (e.g. Iran) while he boarded at English schools. But he, his parents and sister intermittently dropped back into the past and deep family when they returned to visit the Belgian village. He still keeps the family house as a summer retreat, along with the ghosts of the grandparents, aunts and uncles he remembers here.
Starting from fragments of the physical past like old photographs, faint trails where railroad trcks once ran, and empty windows, McGuiness ponders the vagaries that mean each fragment calls forth a particular version of the ‘actual’ past. He also writes indirect, inherited memories of the famous who have links to Bouillon and its region: Verlaine and Rimbaud, Simone Signoret in a film that was shot in the town, and the unrepentent Belgian Nazi Degrelle. Because at its heart the book is about how we construct our memories, and whether we are contained by them or they fall away. McGuiness is contained.
The book consists of dozens of one to five page vignettes or musings. Some strain too hard for artful language, and at times it felt too long to be so deliberately attentuated on every page. But other chapters really take off and are quite wonderful. I particuarly enjoyed ‘Lining’, ‘Angelty’ and ‘Afterword’.
...his [Cendrar’s] idea that you can start anywhere, finish anywhere, but that a certain directedness beyond your ken would always enfold you; or the mysterious, luminous everydayness of modern French train poets like Giles Ortlieb...[his] Tombeau des anges...charts his visits through towns that are in reality epitaphs of towns, town-shaped vacuums; that are to towns what the high water mark is to water, what the scar is to the wound.
July 20, 2014
Why oh why did I read this on day 2 of a 10 day holiday?
Nothing else I've brought is going to live up to it. Folly, thy name is impatience.
A wonderful memoir of times and places now changed or gone, and an exploration of memory itself - why do we feel the need to pin down the mundane, the inconsequential figures and details of our lives? McGuinness was reared, sort of, in Bouillon, in the Ardennes; his mother Belgian, his father a Geordie, his father's father Irish. As a Newcastle-born daughter of Irish parents currently living in Belgium (whadyareckononthosechances?!) his anecdotes about Phillippe Albert and the popularity of the name Kevin in the Ardennes thanks to Kevin Keegan were all the more funny. But this isn't a flippant review of a book that made me laugh and nothing more, not at all, and the book doesn't really focus on England at all but rather the peculiarities of the Belgian Walloons, with whom he is simultaneously complicit and an outsider. McGuinness frequently uses the analogy of memories and photographs as rooms without a building, disjointed snapshots, and his unusual use of form, slipping from poetry to short prose vignette to longer more conventional chapters, is perfect to portray the tricky, fractured nature of memory. His style is alternately witty ('espresso-randy executives'), sobering (his writing about his suicidal aunt Colette and his grandfather Eugene), fascinating (the section on Leon Degrelle) and the Afterword is just sublime. Read. Now.
Nothing else I've brought is going to live up to it. Folly, thy name is impatience.
A wonderful memoir of times and places now changed or gone, and an exploration of memory itself - why do we feel the need to pin down the mundane, the inconsequential figures and details of our lives? McGuinness was reared, sort of, in Bouillon, in the Ardennes; his mother Belgian, his father a Geordie, his father's father Irish. As a Newcastle-born daughter of Irish parents currently living in Belgium (whadyareckononthosechances?!) his anecdotes about Phillippe Albert and the popularity of the name Kevin in the Ardennes thanks to Kevin Keegan were all the more funny. But this isn't a flippant review of a book that made me laugh and nothing more, not at all, and the book doesn't really focus on England at all but rather the peculiarities of the Belgian Walloons, with whom he is simultaneously complicit and an outsider. McGuinness frequently uses the analogy of memories and photographs as rooms without a building, disjointed snapshots, and his unusual use of form, slipping from poetry to short prose vignette to longer more conventional chapters, is perfect to portray the tricky, fractured nature of memory. His style is alternately witty ('espresso-randy executives'), sobering (his writing about his suicidal aunt Colette and his grandfather Eugene), fascinating (the section on Leon Degrelle) and the Afterword is just sublime. Read. Now.
December 23, 2019
To my surprise, I thoroughly enjoyed this book. McGuinness takes you on a journey through Bouillon's history intertwined beautifully with his own family history. A touching mixture of memoire and couleure locale.
December 19, 2025
Defining what this book is about is as difficult as deciding how to pigeon hole the author under my shelving scheme (born in to a Belgian French-speaking mother and an English father of Irish descent, he grew up in Belgium but went to boarding school in England while growing up he also lived for periods in Venezuela, Iran and Romania. He currently lives in Oxford and in Wales teaching French and Comparative Literature at St Anne's College, Oxford and his children are native Welsh speakers). It is easiest to say I love it - maybe there is something about those who don't easily fall into neat categories that appeals to me. I couldn't help thinking of the writer Ian Buruma while reading about Patrick McGuinness's childhood in Bouillon, a Belgian border town and also, to be honest my own fractured identity (though vastly less complicated because there was no linguistic division.
Why do I love and recommend this book as a must read - well his conjuring up of the lost world of his Bouillon childhood resonates with me and his stories such as convincing his children that a recording of Jacques Marchais singing that anarchist staple 'L'bon Dieu Dans Le Merde' was actual the voice of his grandfather is just wonderful. His description of his great grandmother reminded me powerfully of the aged relatives I had known in Ireland:
"Julia was utterly devout and seemed to have been planted in the nineteenth century despite having lived through most of the twentieth, not just because of the wooden clogs...but because of the values that flowed up through her...Julia had lived through both world wars, lost one son to German bombers and waited five years for another (to leave a prisoner of war camp) and spent World War II in an internment camp working the fields for Vichy France...Her body was tall and bony and her face...had wizened serenity we children found delightful..." (page 97).
Maybe it is because of paragraphs like this about another relative:
"To imagine what her life must have been like, the bereavements, the geographical changes, the emotional and cultural adjustments, hurts the mind. Realising...that more people...have this than don't, and have it harder...are more lonely, more violently transplanted, and transported from violence to violence, are more disorientated and bereaved and alone, hurts even more..."
Maybe it is because of that hurt that I love this book so much and say that it is a must read because all to often in a world that promised greater openness through inter-connectivity I feel that everyone is retreating into a narrow crabbed parochialism more stagnant then anything in the past.
Why do I love and recommend this book as a must read - well his conjuring up of the lost world of his Bouillon childhood resonates with me and his stories such as convincing his children that a recording of Jacques Marchais singing that anarchist staple 'L'bon Dieu Dans Le Merde' was actual the voice of his grandfather is just wonderful. His description of his great grandmother reminded me powerfully of the aged relatives I had known in Ireland:
"Julia was utterly devout and seemed to have been planted in the nineteenth century despite having lived through most of the twentieth, not just because of the wooden clogs...but because of the values that flowed up through her...Julia had lived through both world wars, lost one son to German bombers and waited five years for another (to leave a prisoner of war camp) and spent World War II in an internment camp working the fields for Vichy France...Her body was tall and bony and her face...had wizened serenity we children found delightful..." (page 97).
Maybe it is because of paragraphs like this about another relative:
"To imagine what her life must have been like, the bereavements, the geographical changes, the emotional and cultural adjustments, hurts the mind. Realising...that more people...have this than don't, and have it harder...are more lonely, more violently transplanted, and transported from violence to violence, are more disorientated and bereaved and alone, hurts even more..."
Maybe it is because of that hurt that I love this book so much and say that it is a must read because all to often in a world that promised greater openness through inter-connectivity I feel that everyone is retreating into a narrow crabbed parochialism more stagnant then anything in the past.
September 2, 2023
National Day
The fête nationale in Bouillon is unusual for the fact that it also plays the French national anthem, 'La Marseillaise', alongside the Belgian one, 'La Brabançonne'.
(...)
The fire brigade and police are supposed to attend but last year the fire brigade forgot.
The fête nationale in Bouillon is unusual for the fact that it also plays the French national anthem, 'La Marseillaise', alongside the Belgian one, 'La Brabançonne'.
(...)
The fire brigade and police are supposed to attend but last year the fire brigade forgot.
February 10, 2020
Beautiful. Traces the author's childhood in a sleepy Walloon village, depicting the community's tragedies, absurdities and eccentricities with humour and affection.
Also touches on a wide range of issues including memory, family, identity, language and much more.
Also touches on a wide range of issues including memory, family, identity, language and much more.
April 1, 2015
Along with "The Complete Smoking Diaries" and "This Book Can Save Your Life", one of the best books read this year. About memory, though based on his Southern Belgium upbringing, universal in trying to figure out what memory is true, which remembered a certain way many times, has become the reality. Loads of quotable, thoughful stuff, but here four:
(About old shops in a village being converted into homes) “They’ve kept their huge windows but these are blocked off with thick lace curtains, through which you can still make out the blue of the TV screens and old people moving with the slowness of fish in an aquarium.”
Some days I become a factory for sad thoughts: the night shift starts not when I go to bed, but when I decide to go to bed. As I turn the lights out, the factory lights come on. I used to make them by hand, the sad thoughts, but lately it’s become more of an assembly line, the machines doing all the work: I sleep, and in the morning I have another consignment ready for distribution: for export, for import.
(Upon hearing from his mother of his grandfather’s death, sitting at a payphone wearing brown corduroy pants at university in the UK): “My eyes were quite full, and I remember the corduroy lines getting larger as she spoke, magnified by tears that refused to fall.”
As (Irishman) Beckett said, when asked if he was English: "Au contraire."
(About old shops in a village being converted into homes) “They’ve kept their huge windows but these are blocked off with thick lace curtains, through which you can still make out the blue of the TV screens and old people moving with the slowness of fish in an aquarium.”
Some days I become a factory for sad thoughts: the night shift starts not when I go to bed, but when I decide to go to bed. As I turn the lights out, the factory lights come on. I used to make them by hand, the sad thoughts, but lately it’s become more of an assembly line, the machines doing all the work: I sleep, and in the morning I have another consignment ready for distribution: for export, for import.
(Upon hearing from his mother of his grandfather’s death, sitting at a payphone wearing brown corduroy pants at university in the UK): “My eyes were quite full, and I remember the corduroy lines getting larger as she spoke, magnified by tears that refused to fall.”
As (Irishman) Beckett said, when asked if he was English: "Au contraire."
May 16, 2014
http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2291517.html[return][return]McGuinness's mother comes from Bouillon in southern Belgium, and it is basically his second home despite his British upbringng (Irish grandparents, childhood in Newcastle-upon-Tyne, Welsh-speaking children). It's a lovely exploration of the historic town and its people, and the author's own background, through very short snippets of narrative, occasional poetry, and the auithor's own photographs. you don't have to be Belgian or even like Belgium much to appreciate it (though it will make more sense if you have enough French to understand why it's funny that Kevin Keegan should be known to locals as Kevin Qui Gagne). A lovely book.
February 5, 2018
Beryl Bainbridge, said “What we remember is probably fiction anyway, ” can the same be said of Patrick McGuinness’ memoir, Other People’s Countries; A Journey into Memory?
McGuinness takes the reader, and according to the preface, his two sons, for a wander through, what he wants us to believe, are his own childhood memories.
The book opens Tolkien like, with a map of the village of Bouillon, a small town on the border of Belgium and France. One can posit that if the use of such a map is not only to give direction, but a way of setting up the whole ' mise-en- scene' of the book.
Then there is the list of ‘characters’ or ‘Dramatis Personae’ this list, however, makes clear that it does ‘not include the living’.
McGuinness' memoir offers the reader a ‘fantasy’ of characters, all of which appear to be his relatives. There are the great grandparents 'from different branches of the family. Old ladies in colourful dresses...found in recesses of rooms you’d forgotten were there...' who all add colour.
The main characters are his beloved grandmother, Lucie, his ‘anti-raconteur’ grandfather Eugene, his uncles and aunts, in particular, Collette, ‘...childish, loving, delicate and suicidal’. All fragile, slightly broken and of course himself, or himself as he wants to be remembered.
He consistently uses rooms as a 'mnemonic', telling the reader about the house they all lived in; ever changing, ever growing, fluid and full of inconsistencies. These ‘Roman Rooms’ are filed with delightful, delicious and sometimes quite painful fragments, like the fabric, Lucie, the dressmaker, uses as she dressed the good , the bad, the old, the young, the poor and the rich. These fragments of memory line the book much like Lucie lined his clothes. Just as the Moirai of old, she cuts and sews his past, his present and his future; She is ever existent and she moves before and between each fragment, each page, and white space.
McGuinness, together with his memories wanders down a hall of liminality; in between truth and fiction, past and present. He gives the reader photographs as an aide memoir, looking as they must through a dark glass, he encourages them to trying to work out the shade and the light, and to fill in the gaps.
He then cleverly invites the reader to open doors on not only his inner self but on their own. So as you read his memories, you are also transported back into your own hidden lining, filling his blank spaces with your own.
It's a truly memorable read and journey, one which is worth taking,
McGuinness takes the reader, and according to the preface, his two sons, for a wander through, what he wants us to believe, are his own childhood memories.
The book opens Tolkien like, with a map of the village of Bouillon, a small town on the border of Belgium and France. One can posit that if the use of such a map is not only to give direction, but a way of setting up the whole ' mise-en- scene' of the book.
Then there is the list of ‘characters’ or ‘Dramatis Personae’ this list, however, makes clear that it does ‘not include the living’.
McGuinness' memoir offers the reader a ‘fantasy’ of characters, all of which appear to be his relatives. There are the great grandparents 'from different branches of the family. Old ladies in colourful dresses...found in recesses of rooms you’d forgotten were there...' who all add colour.
The main characters are his beloved grandmother, Lucie, his ‘anti-raconteur’ grandfather Eugene, his uncles and aunts, in particular, Collette, ‘...childish, loving, delicate and suicidal’. All fragile, slightly broken and of course himself, or himself as he wants to be remembered.
He consistently uses rooms as a 'mnemonic', telling the reader about the house they all lived in; ever changing, ever growing, fluid and full of inconsistencies. These ‘Roman Rooms’ are filed with delightful, delicious and sometimes quite painful fragments, like the fabric, Lucie, the dressmaker, uses as she dressed the good , the bad, the old, the young, the poor and the rich. These fragments of memory line the book much like Lucie lined his clothes. Just as the Moirai of old, she cuts and sews his past, his present and his future; She is ever existent and she moves before and between each fragment, each page, and white space.
McGuinness, together with his memories wanders down a hall of liminality; in between truth and fiction, past and present. He gives the reader photographs as an aide memoir, looking as they must through a dark glass, he encourages them to trying to work out the shade and the light, and to fill in the gaps.
He then cleverly invites the reader to open doors on not only his inner self but on their own. So as you read his memories, you are also transported back into your own hidden lining, filling his blank spaces with your own.
It's a truly memorable read and journey, one which is worth taking,
October 7, 2015
The author feels like he's trying just a little too hard at times, but there are great insights particularly about how we construct and retain memories of ourselves and our cultures, while writers of fiction would kill for a cast of characters as absurd and varied as those in his little Belgian town.
November 6, 2015
A beautifully written book, with many insights. It is in the form of recollections with the feel of short stories, often ending in a twist, though these are, in fact, the author's recollections of childhood and contemporary visits to the town where he grew up.
February 8, 2017
Superb. What a way to leave your story to your children and descendants.
August 9, 2018
It wasn’t long ago that my childhood home was sold. The surprising longing to go back to it, and emotional upheaval I get when I think about the fact that I no longer can, makes me relate strongly to McGuinness’ nostalgia.
“When I’m asked about events in my childhood, about my childhood at all, I think mostly of rooms. I think of times as places, with walls and windows and doors. To remake that childhood (to remake myself) I’d need to build a house made of all the rooms in which the things and the nothings that went into me happened.”
“Remembering makes things real – it’s the only guarantee that they’ve actually happened. Events owe their existence to memories more than memories owe their existence to events. Most of my childhood feels more real to me now than it did then. There’s been a filtering out of overall meaning or point (half the time now I can’t remember, if I ever knew, who most of the people in my mind’s eye’s memories are – they’re like the forgotten cast of a lost film), and a heightening of detail: smell, taste, sight, touch. Textures and moods and states of mind or body (comfort, safety, warmth, or nausea, cold, sadness) push out the big things, the ‘significance’, the ‘meaning’ of the event. No, they don’t push them out; rather, they become the means by which you get access once again to the big things. Death “becomes concrete once more not because this or that loved family member or friend occupies your heart any more than they once did, but because the timbre of your sorrow comes back to you through your senses, through the feeling you had then, that day, which has stood suspended, has lived in its room unchanged, long after the house itself, the house that gave it context, has crumbled or been demolished. So the house of memory becomes a house in which all the rooms that have survived demolition have been arranged. The house has been flattened but somehow the rooms are all intact. I think that’s what I mean.”
“BEING MEASURED FOR clothes, you learn a lot about lining. Doublure it’s called in French, doubling....
Sometimes it could be spectacular, like someone’s inner life: underneath the grey exterior the world sees, there would be a furnace of shot silk or a pool of seigneurial purple. The wearer might project the outer garment, but really their relationship was with the doublure.”
“You can’t unsay anything, you realise. In a world where you experience things finishing all the time, irrecoverable – buildings, events, people, happenings – all gone to dust, to the great ‘Ubi Sunt’ factory of memory, the things you’ve said seem to stay, long after they were true and even if they weren’t.”
“When I’m asked about events in my childhood, about my childhood at all, I think mostly of rooms. I think of times as places, with walls and windows and doors. To remake that childhood (to remake myself) I’d need to build a house made of all the rooms in which the things and the nothings that went into me happened.”
“Remembering makes things real – it’s the only guarantee that they’ve actually happened. Events owe their existence to memories more than memories owe their existence to events. Most of my childhood feels more real to me now than it did then. There’s been a filtering out of overall meaning or point (half the time now I can’t remember, if I ever knew, who most of the people in my mind’s eye’s memories are – they’re like the forgotten cast of a lost film), and a heightening of detail: smell, taste, sight, touch. Textures and moods and states of mind or body (comfort, safety, warmth, or nausea, cold, sadness) push out the big things, the ‘significance’, the ‘meaning’ of the event. No, they don’t push them out; rather, they become the means by which you get access once again to the big things. Death “becomes concrete once more not because this or that loved family member or friend occupies your heart any more than they once did, but because the timbre of your sorrow comes back to you through your senses, through the feeling you had then, that day, which has stood suspended, has lived in its room unchanged, long after the house itself, the house that gave it context, has crumbled or been demolished. So the house of memory becomes a house in which all the rooms that have survived demolition have been arranged. The house has been flattened but somehow the rooms are all intact. I think that’s what I mean.”
“BEING MEASURED FOR clothes, you learn a lot about lining. Doublure it’s called in French, doubling....
Sometimes it could be spectacular, like someone’s inner life: underneath the grey exterior the world sees, there would be a furnace of shot silk or a pool of seigneurial purple. The wearer might project the outer garment, but really their relationship was with the doublure.”
“You can’t unsay anything, you realise. In a world where you experience things finishing all the time, irrecoverable – buildings, events, people, happenings – all gone to dust, to the great ‘Ubi Sunt’ factory of memory, the things you’ve said seem to stay, long after they were true and even if they weren’t.”
August 4, 2022
A quirky read. The wonderfully named Bouillon (broth) is a small town in Belgium from where the maternal side of the author springs. This foundational place (a town, a house, a family, a people) in which McGuiness, a single child, spent big chunks of time is the springboard for a narrative which is a wonderful hybrid mixing personal memoir, social commentary, historical background... I really enjoyed the mixture, the humour, the poetry... the ultimate melancholy. There are memorable images (like the one that dons the book cover) and unforgettable characters (grandmother Lucie particularly). The unpretentiousness of the style, its succinctness, are great pluses and really allow for the reader´s insertion of her own, parallel, reflections. An excellent read.
February 1, 2021
A collection of reminiscences, anecdotes and family stories about Patrick McGuinness’s childhood visits to Bouillon in Belgium, where his mother’s family lived. Together they provide a narrative collage of McGuinness’s memories of Walloon Belgium and of memory itself. Interleaved with the short essays are black and white photos of objects and locations which we take to be Bouillon.
For some reason, although I usually like this form of narrative and although I have been on holiday to the Ardennes area of Belgium, the book didn’t “reverberate” with me.
First there is memory, its sleights of mind;
then comes forgetting: the traitor betrayed.
For some reason, although I usually like this form of narrative and although I have been on holiday to the Ardennes area of Belgium, the book didn’t “reverberate” with me.
First there is memory, its sleights of mind;
then comes forgetting: the traitor betrayed.
December 22, 2024
McGuiness delivers a unique and quirky memoir of his growing up half-Belgian, filtered through the prism of his memories of spending time in the little Walloon town of Bouillon. The writing is meditative, meandering, granting itself the time to consider and reframe the nature of belonging, family, language, national identity, bilingualism, suffused with a poignant affection for his roots. Despite this, it is rarely a ponderous book, but light and elegant, and also deeply funny. For anyone who -like me- grapples with the evasive realities of living in Belgium, or living across national cultures, this book is a real gem.
October 5, 2019
Review for 'Other people's Countries' by Patrick McGuinness
I always say I will write honest reviews and unfortunately I was not a fan of this book. It started off OK and some of the chapters were quite interesting but after that I completely lost interest. I found myself reading pages and not taking any of it in at all. Some parts of the book had French in it from where the author was remembering things and whereas he translated, some not all of it was translated. I gave it 2/5 on Goodreads. Anyone else read this??
I always say I will write honest reviews and unfortunately I was not a fan of this book. It started off OK and some of the chapters were quite interesting but after that I completely lost interest. I found myself reading pages and not taking any of it in at all. Some parts of the book had French in it from where the author was remembering things and whereas he translated, some not all of it was translated. I gave it 2/5 on Goodreads. Anyone else read this??
March 26, 2018
An interesting and unusual approach to memoir. McGuinness took us in and out of a certain section of his family history, weaving together anecdotes, memories and research. His relatives came to life like characters from a well-written novel. I also liked the way he was unafraid to stake his own place within the story.
May 13, 2020
I picked this up in a charity shop on the strength of its dust jacket blurbs, knowing nothing about it or the author. And now having read it I know more about his childhood than I do about some of my best friends. Which is all to say, it's a beautiful meditation on memory, growing up, place, time, and what makes a family a family.
March 3, 2022
I really enjoyed this gentle exploration of place, memory, childhood and a unique Belgian border town. Although this is a book to slip into your pocket so you can easily dip in and out, it is actually an atlas of history, culture, literature, philosophy and language. A current newspaper column asks celebrities who they would like to invite to dinner. I would choose Patrick McGuinness.
August 5, 2024
no final deste relato da memória de uma infância vivida em parte numa pequena vila belga no coração das ardenas (afinal uma memória de uma memória...), o autor resume tudo numa frase magnífica: “what I want to say is: i misremember all this so vividly it’s as if it only happened yesterday”. e é isso mesmo.
November 28, 2017
My favourite read of 2016.
May 24, 2019
Beautifully written
Lovely stories
Lovely stories
September 6, 2019
A journey into melancholy that rewards patience. This short-form, mixed-genre place memoir should be on all such lists.
September 8, 2020
Absolutely loved the poetic writing and turns of phrases in this book.
The author's experiences of having a dual nationality background rang so very true for me.
The author's experiences of having a dual nationality background rang so very true for me.
August 8, 2022
Schitterende overpeinzingen en observaties van een schrijver die in Bouillon opgroeide en vervolgens naar Engeland migreerde. Poëzie en Filosofie in verhaalvorm. Favoriete hoofdstuk: Tourist train.
March 29, 2023
DNF. Thought I'd like it.
July 16, 2025
I’d give this joyous marvel of a book at least another five stars if I could. Brilliant, both on a sentence to sentence level and structurally as a fully realised project.
April 8, 2015
"First there is memory, its sleights of mind;
"then comes forgetting: the traitor betrayed."
You never fully leave the Old Country, just as you never fully integrate the New one, no matter how much you love either.
The Old Country however does leave you, she evolves and changes, and because you don't spend much time there, you don't change and evolve with her: pretty soon you're a foreigner.
This short book is a bittersweet treat, a little gem of enchanting nostalgia.
"then comes forgetting: the traitor betrayed."
You never fully leave the Old Country, just as you never fully integrate the New one, no matter how much you love either.
The Old Country however does leave you, she evolves and changes, and because you don't spend much time there, you don't change and evolve with her: pretty soon you're a foreigner.
This short book is a bittersweet treat, a little gem of enchanting nostalgia.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 32 reviews