A Bookish Trip to Amsterdam

I'm leaving for Amsterdam with my sweetie today and I'm looking forward to lots of art and lots of gardens. My sightseeing will also include literary tie-ins... of course! These are on my list:

The Museum of Bags and Purses (Tassen museum), because my friend Shawna Lemay's forthcoming novel has something to do with this place.

"The Goldfinch" by Fabritius (at the Mauritshuis in The Hague): even though I wasn't crazy about Donna Tartt's book of the same name, I still want to see the painting. Vermeer's "Girl with the Pearl Earring" is also at the Mauritshuis. It's because of the movie, rather than Tracy Chevalier's book, and also because of the documentary Tim's Vermeer, that I'm excited about seeing Vermeer's work again.

Jessie Burton's The Miniaturist has made me want to seek out Petronella Oortman's dollhouse at the Rijksmuseum... even though I was among the minority of readers not enamoured with the book. I found the novel's flaws outweighed its merits, but that's all I've got to say.

I don't expect to find a cave of mosses at Amsterdam's Hortus Botanicus, but I'll think of Elizabeth Gilbert's The Signature of All Things while I'm there. The garden currently is hosting an exhibit of Josephine's botanical collection at Malmaison that looks interesting.

The Diary of a Young Girl will be front and center at the Anne Frank House, but also a scene from the movie The Fault in Our Stars that has stayed with me: that of Hazel climbing the stairs.

There's a replica of an 18th-century Dutch East India cargo ship moored next to the Scheepvaart Museum that interests me very much. I look forward to climbing around the setting of so many historical novels that I've enjoyed: The Thousand Autumns of Jacob de Zoet (David Mitchell); Set to Sea (Drew Weing); Jamrach's Menagerie (Carol Birch); and She Rises (Kate Worsley), among others.

After 10 days in Amsterdam, we'll spend a few days in Antwerp, home of Pieter Bruegel, a painter I grew to appreciate after reading As Above, So Below (Rudy Rucker). Antwerp also has a fabulous printing museum that displays a copy of Gutenberg's bible.

There's more, but departure looms. Packing reading material is so much easier now with digital devices, but I still have included two paper books in my luggage:

The Land of Decoration. I was reminded that Grace McCleen's first novel has been sitting unread on my bookshelves for three years when I saw that her third, The Offering, is on the Bailey's longlist.

Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town. I've been waiting even longer (decades?) to get around to Stephen Leacock's Canadian classic.

Queued up on my iPod are the following audiobooks:

Joan of Arc by Kathryn Harrison (biography)
Leaving Van Gogh by Carol Wallace (novel from the viewpoint of Van Gogh's doctor)
Irma Voth by Miriam Toews (this is the only one of her books I have not read)
Life Would Be Perfect If I Lived in that House by Meghan Daum (essays)
The Cold Song by Linn Ullmann (Norwegian crime novel in translation)
Kafka on the Shore by Haruki Murakami (my colleague says it's his favourite Murakami)
The Sense of Style by Steven Pinker (I'll probably pester my sweetie with tidbits from this)
Buddha Boy by Kathe Koja (YA)
Boneshaker by Cherie Priest (my nephew's steampunk recommendation)
The Bradshaw Variations by Rachel Cusk (Cusk is on the Baileys longlist for a more recent novel)
Bitter Greens by Kate Forsyth (so much praise for this historical novel with a folk tale at its core)

... more than I'll ever have time to get through, but they don't take any space, really. I'm set!

Kinky and Cosy by Nix

Kinky & Cosy are little twin girls in red dresses. They terrorize their teacher, their parents and pretty much anyone they encounter on the street. They are the offbeat creation of Belgian cartoonist Nix (Marnix Verduyn) and have become so famous that a street in Brussels is named for them.

The collection of strips that I've just finished is an English translation published by NBM in 2011. Many of the 3-panel strips included would be fine for kids and teens, but this collection also contains adult material such as gags about women masturbating with dildos and kids using guns with live ammo, so it lives in the adult collection at my public library. Imagine The Simpsons, The Book of Bunny Suicides and Monty Python all rolled into one. Perfect if you are in the mood for dark and irreverent humour.

For a taste of Nix, check out some animated Kinky & Cosy cartoons (in English) available online here.

The Detour by Gerbrand Bakker

Dutch author Gerbrand Bakker's new novel, The Detour, is suffused with the quiet strength of the woman that is its focus. She is an expert on Emily Dickinson who abruptly leaves her university position in Amsterdam and rents a cottage in a remote part of Wales. She is all alone except for a small flock of geese, whose numbers mysteriously dwindle. 

Why is she there? It appears to be more than the fact of an affair with one of her students. As the  answers to what precipitated her flight become clear, another question propels the narrative. What will happen next? 

I wondered why there was some minor gay content involving secondary characters, until I realized it was included to give further examples of sexual transgressions. The human instinct for sex, however, is a sideline to the main story.

I enjoyed the spare prose style and I will be haunted by the choices made by the central character. This would be a good book for discussion.

Readalikes: The Spare Room (Helen Garner); Vital Signs (Tessa McWatt); The London Train (Tessa Hadley); Molly Fox's Birthday (Deirdre Madden).

The Expats by Chris Pavone

The Expats are an American couple with two children who move to Luxembourg and then Paris, both of them keeping huge secrets from each other. Chris Pavone's novel has been compared to Robert Ludlum's early works. That was enough to make me want to read this book; I went through a bit of a spy thriller phase in the 80s and Ludlum was my favourite back then.

I've only got good things to say about The Expats:

• It's a first novel, which in itself is an attraction for readers like me who like novelty.
• The plot is enjoyably twisty.
• The narrative flips back and forth in time, with convenient font changes to keep present-day Paris separate from two years earlier in Luxembourg. 
• There are enough details of daily life in a foreign country to feed my appetite for travel writing. 
• The children are never in danger.
• The open-ending is of the sort that concludes the main storyline while leaving lots of room for imagining what might come next.

Highly recommended.

As Above, So Below: A Novel of Peter Bruegel by Rudy Rucker

In this rich imagining of the life of 16th century Flemish painter, Pieter Bruegel the Elder, Rudy Rucker  uses one of Bruegel's works to title each chapter.  The novel spans the second half of his life, to his death at age 44. It begins in 1551 with his trip to Italy and subsequent return to Antwerp as a young man, then the progress of his love life, friendships, and family life as he built a following for his work (and dropped the 'h' from his surname). His paintings and drawings contained veiled political and religious commentary, a risky thing during a time when treason and religious heresy were punishable by death.

Art lovers and fans of historical fiction will find this book interesting. I picked it up before heading off to Belgium and only got halfway through before my trip. Now that I'm home, I just couldn't seem to get back into it, so I read the final chapter  to see how things turned out and it feels like that is enough. It was nice that the storyline involving Bruegel's gay friend, mapmaker Ortelius, is also wrapped up in the final chapter.

I learned a lot, but it isn't exactly a page-turner. Rucker's style is often more like a university lecture (albeit an interesting one). Here's an example: "Leaning against the wall were two great oak panels, nearly five feet across and four feet high, each of them painted with hundreds of little figures, too many to count.* Bruegel and his patron Nicolas Jonghelinck called them wemel paintings. The word wemel meant 'seethe' or 'boil'; it was the word they'd used in Bruegel's village to describe the motion of a mass of insects:** like ants, like the roly-poly bugs found under a rotten log, or like the springtails in a wet pile of duckweed at the river's edge."

While I was in a museum in Brussels, it was a thrill to see the original painting that was used on the dust jacket of this book, The Fall of the Rebel Angels. Reading As Above, So Below, (well, as much of it as I managed) gave me a greater appreciation and a deeper understanding of the early Flemish art I saw on the trip. In the story, Bruegel spends hours examining the paintings of his hero, Hieronymous Bosch. This gave me the idea to take my time with similar art, since so much is going on in them. I felt rewarded to spy such things as a street vendor cooking waffles in The Fight Between Carnival and Lent. And then I went outside to enjoy waffles on the streets of Brussels...

*A quibble - I believe stars are too many to count, but not figures in a painting.
 **Why didn't he just put a period here?

Pieter Brueghel II; detail from a copy of his father's work.

The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier

Correspondence from February 2004:

I’ve read another book that I wouldn’t recommend: The Lady and the Unicorn by Tracy Chevalier (author of The Girl with the Pearl Earring). I liked it better than The Red Tent and it did make me want to go back to the Museum of the Middle Ages in Paris to see the series of unicorn tapestries there again. Some parts of the book were good. I liked reading about places I recognized in Paris. I learned a lot about the making of tapestries and feel I’ll have a deeper appreciation of them next time I see some. I also enjoyed the shifting points of view -- there are about 7 different narrators.

It needed a better editor, unfortunately. Some sentences don’t make sense, like “I would like my hands to be soft as the rose petals these Ladies in the tapestries must soak theirs in.” Also, Nicolas tells us “I bowed so low my head throbbed. It never hurt to bow low.” Well, which is it? Throbbing or not hurting? I understand what the author means to say about subservience being useful to a poor artist, but I think it is an unfortunate combination of sentences.

There’s a line “Birds finding their mates indeed” which has absolutely no relation to anything said previously, although later in the betrothal feast (of Claude to a young nobleman), pairs of large birds are served for the meal. Either something was cut out or paragraphs were shifted without taking this reference to mating birds into account.

Some characters behave inexplicably. The 14-year-old love interest, Claude, is sucking on a clove because she has a toothache, yet she laughs and skips and teases Nicolas, the painter commissioned to design the tapestries. (Why not have Claude sucking on a clove later in the story, when she stays home sick and the rest of her family goes out? The author could still show off her knowledge of medieval remedies and the toothache would play a believable part in the plot.) Claude also refers to her mother as “my mistress” the first time we meet her, when neither the reader nor Nicolas know that she is a daughter of the house. Every other time, she calls her mother “maman”, yet there is no other indication that Claude purposely misled Nicolas into thinking she is a servant.

I’m guessing you aren’t going to read The Lady and the Unicorn, but if you do, don’t read this last paragraph coming up.

Most inexplicable is why the lady-in-waiting, Beatrice, would marry Nicolas. The reader is given to understand that Claude’s mother and Beatrice together conspire to this wedding arrangement in order to punish both Nicolas and Claude for their previous indiscretion. Beatrice has shown no interest in Nicolas, neither has he to her, and she knows he is a womanizer who cares not a fig for the bastard babies he fathers. And that is how the story ends.