The Drowned Land

An exquisite novella following the collapse of a delicately erotic spell of lucid dreaming into nightmare and finally a sobering awakening into the promise of realismThe city of Aquelon is sheltered by moored lightsails, ensconced in a calm and misty land where the division between water and sky has dissipated. Its people are happy, free of jealousy and any ties to affection. The Emperor of Aquelon has signed a final law repealing all past and future laws and has cast his crown upon the waters. It is the era of the ineffable, without distinction between life and death, in which the lure of water leads even children to live and die as flowers, drowning themselves with smiles to drift toward a shoreless horizon of eternity. A traveler arrives at this paradise, speaking of Rome's marble palaces and monuments—the land of Virgil with laws carved into stone. Aquelon's reign of dream begins to come apart under the destructive force of desire and the violence of nothingness as rituals are broken and nights are consumed by shrieks of horror. Belgian author and playwright Paul Willems spent three years working on The Drowned Land before it was first published in 1990. Transforming his memories of the Drowned Land of Saeftinghe into an oneiric Atlantis, its ruins of reverie offer up a luminous pessimism. Paul Willems (1912–97) published his first novel, Everything Here Is Real, in 1941. Three more novels and, toward the end of his life, two collections of short stories bracketed his career as a playwright.