The Sorrow of Belgium (Dutch: Het verdriet van België) is a 1983 novel by the Belgian author Hugo Claus (1929–2008).

[3] The novel itself is a Bildungsroman and Künstlerroman,[4] formed from two sections: The work was first published in an English translation by Arnold J. Pomerans in 1994.

Louis Seynaeve, who becomes eleven in April, goes to a boarding school led by nuns in Haarbeke, a fictitious town close to Kortrijk.

Wim Hazeu in Hervormd Nederland: "After Claus probably no one in our Sprachraum will be able to write such a big and in many views great book about Belgium in wartime.

He noted that "while Claus’s novel is a major exercise in the recovery of buried historical experience, it is weirder and more idiosyncratic than this summary suggests.

It is a chronicle not only of the years of social deprivation and darkness but of the 'slimy, inner civil war' in the protagonist’s consciousness.