- Atlantic Wall

Atlantic Wall, as filtered through Vanfleteren’s discerning gaze, unfolds as a meditation on memory, thresholds, and the uncanny persistence of place. The author channels a lyric documentary instinct, tracking the marks of history along coastal margins where power, war, and daily life brush against one another. The prose moves with a measured tempo, translating landscape into a record of affect, where sand, sea, and stone become witnesses rather than merely settings. The work deftly mingles personal testimony with larger historical currents, suggesting that borderlines—physical and emotional—are perpetually negotiable, susceptible to revision by perception. Images and scenes accumulate with a tactful restraint, inviting readers to assemble meaning rather than to be handed a single, definitive interpretation. Through its restrained renders, the book achieves a quiet critical force, prompting reflection on how memory inscribes itself onto the visible world. The result is a book that speaks in a hushed, insistent voice about presence, absence, and the fragile continuity of human narratives along the edge of the map.