Word: verhaeghen
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...criticism of the U.S., it's revealing that the Flemish world's hottest novelist tends to refer to Americans as "we." While Verhaeghen remains a Belgian citizen, the pull of America is strong. "I've reached two points of no return. I've been here 10 years, and I'm married to an American," says Verhaeghen, whose wife is also a psychologist. "I don't equate the country with what is happening now. I believe America's heart is in the right place...
Omega Minor was born of curiosity about a past that Verhaeghen, 42, never knew. "I was doing a postdoc at Potsdam in 1995," he recalls, moments before leaving his Atlanta home for a psychology conference in California. "I took the train to Berlin and emerged at Mitte, the center of old East Berlin. I found myself alone on this huge square, except for a strange glow coming from a glass plate in the pavement. There was a small white underground chamber lined with empty bookshelves. On it was that famous [Heinrich] Heine quote, 'Where they burn books, they will...
...Verhaeghen began reading. He took courses in relativity, cosmology and Yiddish fiction. Nine years later, he was finished. "Honestly, I don't know why I wrote so much," he says. His Dutch publisher made him delete 120 pages of footnotes. He worked many of them, largely scientific explanations, into the main text, making the book a translator's nightmare. "Later, when the book was being translated into English, I saw a sample," he says. "It was excellent, but I didn't recognize my voice. Until then I hadn't realized I had a voice! So I did 30 pages myself...
...Verhaeghen slaved at the translation - "250,000 frigging words!" - prize money kept rolling in. "I was working on a sentence at the war's end, about how the former Nazi camps were being filled with prisoners by the Soviets," he recalls. "It struck me that it was happening all over again, in America - the limits on freedom of speech, the first evidence of torture." As a U.S. resident, Verhaeghen would have to pay American income tax on his prize money, then about $25,000. "I could imagine it would go for schools and hospitals, but in reality much...
...heart is in psychology. He is finishing a book on aging and memory for Oxford University Press, so fiction must wait. "I'm completely exhausted. Omega Minor said it all; I have nothing left." Still, Verhaeghen finds his new surroundings intriguing. "Atlanta is a different kind of history - the Civil War, the civil-rights movement. Things are starting to move in my mind. If you see me in a seedy part of town, don't panic. I'll just be doing research...