Although it may be claimed that the traditional Bildungsroman died out at the beginning of the twentieth century, the coming-of-age novel, to be understood in a wider sense, seems to be more alive than ever. A recent example, Flemish writer Hugo Claus's The Sorrow of Belgium (1983), a multi-faceted novel set in the German-occupied Flanders during the Second World War, seems to share with Joyce's classic A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man quite a few features, such as the pervasive presence of Catholicism, a politically-charged representation of language and certain figures of imagination. This article aims at investigating how Joyce's novel may have paved the way for the bizarre The Sorrow by showing how shared features are regularly transformed into grotesque or disquieting subject-matter by Claus as if that were his way to deal with the role-model.