Sunday Salon: A literary pilgrimage

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The Sunday Salon

This weekend during a trip to London to visit my friend H, we randomly decided to visit Highgate Cemetery. I had no idea who was buried there, I just thought it would be a historically interesting place to visit. So imagine my surprise at finding it was such a rich trove of literary history.

We went on a tour while we were there, which I’m really glad we did as it added lots of interesting details about Victorian superstitions and fashions as well as stories about colourful characters who are mostly now forgotten. Though of course there were sad stories as well. (The giant tomb built by Julius Beer, owner of The Observer, for his eight-year-old daughter is a heartbreaking symbol of grief.)

Writers buried at Highgate include Douglas Adams (which was probably the grave I was most moved to see), Beryl Bainbridge, George Eliot, John Galsworthy, Stella Gibbons, Radclyffe Hall, Christina Rossetti, Dante Gabriel Rossetti (who shares a grave not only with his sister but also with his wife Lizzy Siddell), Anthony Shaffer, plus Karl Marx might arguably be called a writer (along with his many other titles). There’s also Charles Dickens’ wife Catherine, Julian Barnes’ wife Pat Kavanagh and William Foyle, co-founder of the Foyles chain of bookshops.

Untitled Untitled

But of course even without the famous names, a cemetery is a rich trove of stories. Whether it’s just an interesting name, or a detail in an inscription, or a place and date of death, or two apparently unrelated people buried together, there are so many stories, real or that you can invent. Which is why I’ve always liked walking around cemeteries.

Untitled Highgate ramble

That we came out of it is a miracle

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The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank

The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank
by Willy Lindwer
translated from Dutch by Alison Meersschaert

This was a tough read, in more ways than one, but it was also an enlightening and occasionally reaffirming one and I’m glad I have read it, so thank you H (who gave this to me as a present).

The title is to be honest misleading. This is not a book about Anne Frank. Rather, Anne Frank is a loose link between six Dutch women who tell their stories of the war and their experiences of concentration camps. More accurately what they have in common is that they were all arrested by the Nazis toward the end of the occupation of the Netherlands and taken to Westerbork, the Dutch transit camp, and from there were transported to Germany or Poland – to Auschwitz-Birkenau or to Bergen-Belsen, where they had contact with Anne Frank and some other members of her family. But for the most part Anne Frank’s role in this book is small. Really, these are the stories of six remarkable women who survived not only the war but also the Nazi concentration camps.

“I always envied the birds who could fly away. It seemed so fantastic to me to be able to fly, to go wherever you wanted to…You saw the birds everywhere; everywhere, there were birds, even in Auschwitz, even in Birkenau, and certainly in Bergen-Belsen, where it was so beautifully green and, at the same time, so gruesomely grey.”
— Rachel van Amerongen-Frankfoorder

Five of the women were, like the Frank family and other occupants of the Secret Annexe, arrested in summer 1944 and they met the Franks at Westerbork (only one of these five had half known the Franks beforehand, as she was at the Jewish Lyceum with Anne and Margot, but not in either of their classes). Their late arrests are the result of them having been in hiding. Three of them worked for the Resistance, helping others to hide, producing pamphlets or false papers, getting food or ration books to where they were needed, and they were arrested for this rather than for being Jewish (though they all had Jewish heritage).

The one story that is different from the others and most strongly adheres to the book’s title is that of Hannah Elisabeth Pick-Goslar, who had been a close friend of Anne Frank’s (in the diary she was originally given the pseudonym Lies Goosens but more recent editions use her childhood name Hanneli Goslar). She had a very similar background to Anne, born in Germany to a respected Jewish family in 1928, they moved to Amsterdam in 1933 as a result of anti-Jewish legislation and her father, a lawyer, set up a firm to advise refugees. She went to all the same schools as Anne and lived on the same street. Their families even went away together a few times (a postcard from one of those holidays is still on the wall of Anne’s room in Anne Frank House). As the Goslars were more religious, the Franks would go to them for Jewish holidays and Hannah would go to the Franks for national holidays (New Year and Sinterklaas). Hannah was one of the first to find out that the Franks had disappeared in 1942, but she was told the false story that the Franks had gone to Switzerland (where Otto Frank’s mother lived). Hannah writes about Anne as a good friend who was charming, beautiful, flirtatious and already considered a talented writer, but also as someone who was often sick and, as anyone who has read her diary knows, stubborn.

The Goslars were rounded up by the Nazis in June 1943 and thanks to political connections spent eight months in Westerbork before moving on to Bergen-Belsen, where they were kept in relative comfort (and stayed together as a family, which was extremely rare). When Hannah found out that Anne and Margot were in another camp on the site, separated from her by a barbed wire fence, she arranged to speak to Anne regularly and threw small packages of food over. It is clear from Hannah’s description that Anne’s side of the fence suffered far worse conditions and that Anne herself was desperately changed, had basically given up, but it is the testimonies of the other women in this book that really fill in how awful those conditions were.

Perhaps the most touching part of Hannah’s story comes after the war ended. She and her sister, now orphans aged 16 and 5, had returned to the Netherlands and were waiting to see who would adopt them, when Otto Frank showed up. He had seen their names on a list and travelled a long way to come and help them (considering he himself had only recently returned from Auschwitz). He took them first to Switzerland, where they had an uncle, and then helped Hannah apply for Israeli citizenship. They stayed in touch until he died and Hannah describes him as being like a father to her. Her words made me look on Otto Frank very differently, as a man who despite all his work around Anne’s diary actually did move on and find happiness and fulfilment.

The other five women’s stories are quite different, to be honest much darker, and I think it does them a disservice to make it all about Anne Frank. But to a certain extent this is acknowledged by the author’s introduction. Lindwer writes that he interviewed these women in the 1980s for a documentary about Anne Frank and that afterwards he felt it was a shame that such small snippets of their testimonies were used, because telling their stories had been so painful for them but also because they were important stories that deserved to be told. And so this book was born, containing the full interviews, serving (much like the Definitive Edition of Anne Frank’s diary) as a historical record more than as a work of art. It appears as though little has been edited, including facts, as there are multiple points on which these testimonies disagree, but then they are recalling the most painful experiences from 40 years later.

“Auschwitz was really the end of everything; the clay soil always with standing water; a huge quagmire without a sprig of green…There was nothing, nothing that looked alive, no flower, nothing, absolutely nothing. It was the end of everything, really the end. That we came out of it is a miracle. Very religious people understand it better than I do, because I never understood that a higher being – if one exists – could let all of this happen.”
— Lenie de Jong-van Naarden

They are clearly all amazing women and they deal with their past and their survival in different ways. My favourite story (and I’m guessing Lindwer agrees as it gets by far the most pages) is that of Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper who along with her husband Bob worked in the Resistance from 1939, and later at Auschwitz and Bergen-Belsen volunteered as a nurse (she had some first aid training, though with the almost complete lack of supplies there wasn’t much could do for the sick except clean them with only a little water, but she did keep them company and sing songs). But they are all incredible stories and I learned so much, good and bad, from this book.

I suppose it is true that this has taught me more about Anne Frank, but mostly it has made me think of her death differently. It always seemed such hopelessly tragically bad luck that she was on the last Nazi prisoner transport from Holland, that she was moved from Auschwitz just weeks before it was liberated, that she died at Bergen-Belsen just weeks before that too was liberated, even that she died from illness and not from being selected for extermination. And of course it was tragic, but it was sadly not unusual. That last transport train carried more than 1000 people to Auschwitz, of whom just 127 survived the next eight months. The conditions at Bergen-Belsen were so bad that the majority of the inmates died of illness – typhus, starvation, pneumonia – shortly before or in the first few weeks after liberation. It was all awful and I am saddened and disturbed but also glad that I have learned a little more about it.

“I have told this because I want to make it very clear to a large number of people that all discrimination – whatever form it takes – is evil and that the world can go to pieces because of it…It only takes one person to say, ‘He isn’t as good as I am, because he has—’ You fill in the rest…We have to make sure that it will never happen again.”
— Janny Brandes-Brilleslijper

Die Laatste Zeben Maanden: Vrouwen in Het Spoor Van Anne Frank published 1988 by Gooi & Sticht.
This translation first published 1991 by Random House.

Source: This was a present from my friend H who bought it at Anne Frank House in Amsterdam.

I want to go on living even after my death

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The Diary of a Young Girl

The Diary of a Young Girl
by Anne Frank
edited by Otto H Frank and Mirjam Pressler
translated by Susan Massotty

This Definitive Edition of the diary of Anne Frank is not, according to the publisher’s note, intended to replace the earlier version edited by Anne’s father Otto shortly after her death, but instead to serve as a more accurate historical record for those who have already read the (quite heavily) edited version. It is in some ways quite a different book and almost makes me want to refer to the Critical Edition, which compares Anne’s original diary, her own edits and her father’s edits.

This is one of the aspects of the diary that I only learned this year – Anne Frank edited and rewrote the majority of her own diary in early 1944 after hearing on the radio that the Dutch government wanted after the war to collect eyewitness accounts of Dutch people who had lived through the German occupation. Otto Frank’s edit combined material from both versions of Anne’s diary and even some accounts she wrote about life in hiding that had been thinly veiled as short stories. The Definitive Edition is almost entirely composed of Anne’s self-edits, which I like because that is what she intended to have published herself – it’s why she went to the effort of doing all that editing.

“I don’t want to have lived in vain like most people. I want to be useful or bring enjoyment to all people, even those I’ve never met. I want to go on living even after my death…When I write I can shake off all my cares. My sorrow disappears, my spirits are revived!”

The Definitive Edition is quite a bit longer (30% apparently) than Otto Frank’s edit, because he cut a lot of stuff out. Partly this was because the original publisher was aiming at a young adult audience and therefore wanted something short and without any references to sex or puberty. And Anne, pardon the pun, could be very frank with her diary, which she called Kitty and spoke to like a friend (she even, in some places, writes as though she is addressing questions that Kitty has asked her). But the thing that struck me most reading this edition is that most of what had been cut out was material that might be considered unflattering or even outright cruel about the other occupants of the annexe, especially her mother.

I should probably include a summary of Anne Frank’s story for those who don’t already know it. Otto Frank was a successful businessman in Frankfurt-am-Main, Germany, which is where Anne and her older sister Margot were born. In 1933, when Anne was four, changes to German law regarding Jews led to the family moving to Amsterdam, where Otto continued his business, Opekta. In 1940 the Netherlands was occupied by the Nazis, who immediately introduced anti-Jewish laws there. Otto and his business partner Hermann van Pels signed their business over to a trusted non-Jewish colleague and the girls had to move to a Jewish school, but Otto and his wife Edith anticipated worse to come and soon began planning a safe hiding place. In 1942 a summons arrived for Margot and within days the Frank family was installed in the Secret Annexe – a building attached to the back of the Opekta warehouse that had formerly served as a laboratory and extra office space. The Van Pels family joined them there (Anne gave them pseudonyms in her edited diary, so you may know them as the Van Daans), as did family friend Fritz Pfeffer (Albert Dussel in the diary). They remained hidden for two years, until 4 August 1944, when the SS arrested all eight occupants of the annexe. They were taken to various concentration camps and only Otto Frank survived the war. When he returned to Amsterdam, one of the Opekta secretaries who had helped the families to hide gave him Anne’s diary, which she had retrieved from the annexe and hidden.

“[Miep] brings five library books with her every Saturday, We long for Saturdays because that means books. We’re like little children with a present. Ordinary people don’t know how much books can mean to someone who’s cooped up.”

The diary really is a mixture of many things. It’s an open, honest account of being a teenager, and the joys, frustrations, changes and experiences that most girls will have between 13 and 15 years old (the diary was given to Anne on her 13th birthday, in June 1942). It’s also a record of someone learning to be a writer, from before she harboured that ambition, through discovering it, to beginning to refine her work and identify what kind of writer she might be. It is of course a historical record of being a Jew under Nazi occupation, of Amsterdam in wartime, with all the food shortages and the thefts and suspicion that follow on from privation. And it’s a study of people under intense pressure, squeezed into a fairly small space physically but of course it’s the psychological pressure that made it really claustrophobic.

“I’ve been taking valerian every day to fight the anxiety and depression, but it doesn’t stop me from being even more miserable the next day. A good hearty laugh would help more than ten valerian drops, but we’ve almost forgotten how to laugh. Sometimes I’m afraid my face is going to sag with all this sorrow and that my mouth will permanently droop at the corners.”

Having been to the building itself, at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam, helped me to visualise a lot more of the diary this time around. The annexe was in effect insulated from the warehouse (where none of the workers knew anyone was hiding upstairs) by the Opekta offices, where all the regular staff knew about the occupants of the annexe and helped them a great deal. The neighbouring buildings were all businesses, and therefore empty at night. But although this allowed them to make at least a little noise, they still had to be extremely careful not to ever be seen, so blinds or curtains were kept drawn and windows could only be opened a little overnight, but had to be strictly closed during the day. Outside of business hours they did sometimes leave the annexe and use the rest of the building – most of them took their baths in the office or the office kitchen and they sometimes used the office kitchen to cook – but as break-ins became more frequent this became ever more dangerous.

“I see the eight of us in the Annexe as if we were a patch of blue sky surrounded by menacing black clouds. The perfectly round spot on which we’re standing is still safe, but the clouds are moving in on us, and the ring between us and the approaching danger is being pulled tighter and tighter.”

I don’t remember from my previous reading of the diary there having been so many break-ins and other near-misses and I found myself, in the last couple of months of the diary, thinking each time – was that it? Was that time they forgot to unbolt the warehouse door, or that time the warehouse manager spotted an open window, or that time they actually chased off burglars from the warehouse, the time that someone realised people were hiding there and reported it? It’s genuinely chilling to read Anne describe them as near-misses when maybe one of them wasn’t a miss at all. (Though it could just as easily have been more mundane. A lot of people knew they were there, from food suppliers to official Jewish organisations, and a slip of the tongue or a beating from the police could have betrayed them.)

I realise I’ve written a lot without really reviewing the book itself. Partly that’s because it’s impossible for me to separate the book from the wider story that it’s part of. But of course I do have responses specific to the book. Despite Anne’s edits it is still brutally honest because that is who she was. She records her joys, her rages, her depressions, her contemplations and above all she judges herself. Often she will make a proclamation that sounds ill-thought-through and childish (that she is too independent to need her parents, for example), only to tear it down a few days later, berating herself harshly, especially when she has upset her father, who she doted on. But then there are also passages that are beautiful and/or insightful. She says a few times that she has had to grow up too fast, that going into hiding effectively stole her childhood, and of course she’s right. At 15 she is better read and much more politically aware than I was at that age, but it’s more than that. She becomes quite astute when it comes to understanding people and their motives. Where in 1942 she simply dislikes most of the annexe occupants (her father and Margot are really the only exceptions, and even they come in for criticism), over time she learns to understand them all and be on better terms with them, though the relationships all remain volatile.

For the first half of this reread I didn’t think I had fallen for Anne the way I had previously. The extra material criticising her mother and Mrs van Pels/van Daan turned me off a little. But of course I was won over and if anything the change in Anne over time was more apparent and the ending more poignant. This wasn’t just yet another girl who dreamed of being a writer, this was someone capable of great things who sadly (that word is so inadequate) was only able to give the world one great thing, but what a gift it was.

Het Achterhuis first published 1947.
This translation first published by Doubleday in 1995.
Revised with extra material in 2001.

He could almost feel his psychosoma being buoyed up

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The Lathe of Heaven

The Lathe of Heaven
by Ursula le Guin

Le Guin is one of the big names in modern science fiction and I had been meaning to read her for years, so I was glad to persuade my book club to join me in the adventure. Sadly, it turned out to be one of my less successful ventures into the genre, or at least a mixed result.

I loved the idea and the story built around it, and the opening chapter was for me quite attention-grabbing. George Orr is strung out on drugs in a version of Portland, Oregon that is suffering from runaway global warming, overpopulation and intense policing. As such he soon catches the attention of the authorities, who refer him to drug rehab in the form of the psychiatrist Dr Haber. Here we learn that Orr had been taking drugs to stop himself from sleeping, because when he dreams, his dreams change the world around him. Haber is initially sceptical but quickly discovers that it’s not only true, but that he can use hypnosis to influence Orr’s dreams. So begins the tug of war between the two men, fighting for control of Orr’s power.

“Current-borne, wave-flung, tugged hugely by the whole might of the ocean, the jellyfish drifts in the tidal abyss. The light shines through it, and dark enters it…Hanging, swaying, pulsing, the most vulnerable and insubstantial creature, it has for its defence the violence and power of the whole ocean.”

It really is a wonderfully original premise that remained original and fascinating throughout. At its heart it’s such a simple idea, but one with almost infinite possibilities, so I was glad that Le Guin kept the story focused quite narrowly on Orr. She does throw in a romance, but it’s done well, sans cheese and gives Orr another facet to consider when making major world-changing decisions.

But I must admit, for all that the idea and the story and even the details of the story thrilled me, I was not hugely impressed by the prose. I found it a little workmanlike, with sometimes wooden dialogue. Perhaps partly I was noticing aspects of the book that haven’t dated well. For instance, there’s a whole storyline revolving around skin colour that was clearly well intentioned and potentially fascinating, but the language used was so old-fashioned it made me cringe.

“Damn the stupid little bastard! He had got out of control. Haber cocked his head and maintained a tolerant, noninterfering silence; it was all he could do…
‘You said you remembered the Plague; but don’t you also remember that there wasn’t any Plague, that nobody died of pollutant cancer, that the population just kept on getting bigger and bigger? No? You don’t remember that?’
…Orr was quite white; the cheekbones stood out in his face. He sat staring up at Haber. He said nothing.”

I also struggled a little with the character of Orr. He’s so very passive, even when he tries to take control. Of course, he had to be a bit wet for the whole story to work, but it certainly makes him difficult to engage with.

However, there were elements I loved about this book. There’s a fantastic (and surreal) sense of humour that nicely balances out the more serious parts. And I like that Dr Haber is almost inscrutable, certainly neither wholly good nor wholly bad. He’s like a parable of a politician, telling himself he has the best of intentions, but in reality with all that power at his fingertips if he can just keep Orr in line… It really is a very interesting dynamic between the two men.

“After a week’s solid rain, barometric pressure was up and the sun was out again, above the river mist. Well aware from a thousand EEG readings of the link between the pressure of the atmosphere and the heaviness of the mind, he could almost feel his psychosoma being buoyed up by that bright, drying wind. Have to keep that up, keep the climate improving, he thought rapidly, almost surreptitiously.”

I have for a long time linked Ursula le Guin with Margaret Atwood because they are female North American writers of a similar age who have included a lot of SF in their back catalogues and are also friends and have discussed Big Ideas together publicly. So I suppose I expected Atwood-style prose. Instead I got an idea that was, I’d suggest, far more impressive than the basis of any Atwood book I have read, but without the mastery of language to make the most of it.

I will certainly try Le Guin again – at the very least the others of her titles included in the SF Masterworks series along with this one – but I am not yet convinced.

First published in Amazing Stories Magazine in 1971.

Source: Borrowed from Tim (who hasn’t actually read this yet, so I will have to get him to read it and have another mini book club about it!)

Anything is a weapon if you’re in deep enough trouble

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Hawkeye Volume 1
by Matt Fraction

Hawkeye cover by David Aja

I think Tim is slowly but surely turning me into a Marvel fan. It began with the X-Men films, then the Avengers films, then the TV shows (Ultimate Spider-Man is really very good, and not just “for a cartoon”) and now finally he’s got me reading the comics. Although, thinking about it, I first heard the new Hawkeye comics recommended by Michael Kindness on the Books on the Nightstand podcast and passed that on to Tim, who read the first few and in turn told me I’d like them too. It’s all got a bit meta.

Anyway, the point is that I am writing this review as someone who has never read traditional superhero comics. I’ve read some of the alternative self-contained ones – Watchmen, Saga, League of Extraordinary Gentlemen – but never braved the whole mega universe of dozens or even hundreds of characters interacting over several decades that you are faced with when you pick up a mainstream Marvel or DC comic. Until now. I feel that I’m on the brink of a vortex of thousands of stories and I can’t decide if that’s daunting or exciting!

Of course, Hawkeye isn’t strictly a superhero. He’s a really really good archer. But he is part of the Marvel universe and interacts with proper job superheroes (Captain America, Iron Man, Hulk) and they all have their own storylines that weave in and out of each other’s. What’s nice about this latest series about Hawkeye is that its emphasis is on the time when Hawkeye isn’t working with the Avengers, so it can be read in isolation perhaps more easily and it has a look and feel that aren’t, to me, very “superhero”.

“You cowboy around with the Avengers some. Guys got, what? Armor. Magic. Super-powers. Super-strength. Shrink-dust. Grow-rays. Magic. Healing factors. I’m an orphan raised by carnies. Fighting with a stick and a string from the Paleolithic era. So when I say this looks ‘bad’? I promise you it feels worse.”

In fact, my initial attraction to these comics, and still one of my favourite aspects, is the extremely stylish design. The artwork is simple and stylised with a limited colour palette. This hardback volume includes one crossover comic from the series Young Avengers Presents and the difference in appearance really stands out. So I have nothing but praise for the whole art team.

But I think I wouldn’t have lasted 11 issues if the stories weren’t as good as the art. The basic thesis is that Hawkeye/Clint Barton is a good but flawed man with plenty of secrets and not the best history with women. He lives in New York City in an apartment building with a pretty varied bunch of ne’er-do-wells and tries to fend off the local branch of Russian mafia.

It’s not the first attempt to humanise a hero or to get under the skin of a man who’s afraid of commitment, but that doesn’t stop it from being an interesting combination with action adventure and daily life in a grimier corner of the city. There’s also the quite lovely relationship that Clint has with the Young Avengers Hawkeye, a teenager called Kate whose archery skills can match his but who needs advice on some other aspects of working seedy underworld jobs one day, and then for SHIELD the next day.

“Anything is a weapon if you’re in deep enough trouble. There’s no special training. No special skill. Just the belief that at any time you might have to hurt someone to stay alive. What kind of animal walks into a room and figures out what they can use to hurt people if they have to hurt? What kind…”

Another thing that makes this series stand out is the complicated timeline. It really isn’t always clear what order some events occur in. It’s certainly not linear, even within one issue. And some of the other information supplied can tend to the oblique, rather than spelling it all out for you. It’s genuinely complex writing that both draws you in and slows you down, which is good, as I’ve found that sometimes I tend to race through comics and almost skip the artwork. Here, so much is unsaid that I find myself “reading” the pictures carefully to find any clues not provided in words.

So was I won over because the first comic in this series is about Hawkeye meeting Pizza Dog? Possibly. I am a sucker for a dog lover. But I have stayed interested and am looking forward to volume 2 already. Yay, Hawkguy!

This collection published 2013 by Marvel.

Source: Excelsior! comic-book shop, Bristol.

Amsterdam: Anne Frank books

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Anne Frank books
(Click to enlarge)

I now own a small collection of books written by or about Anne Frank.

Yes, that’s two copies of The Diary of a Young Girl. The big hardback was a new translation from 1995 and this is the copy I read when I was 18 (I think I had previously borrowed the earlier translation from the library when I was 13 or so). It deeply affected me, as I think it affects everyone who reads it, so the one thing I was sure of when we planned our holiday to Amsterdam was that I was going to Anne Frank House and I was going to stand in the Secret Annexe.

The second of these books that came into my possession is The Last Seven Months of Anne Frank, which my dear friend H bought for me at (where else?) Anne Frank House when she holidayed there last year. Because she knows me well, she knew I’d already own the diary.

But that didn’t stop me from wanting the newer version of the diary, released in 2001, with previously unpublished material. And of course when I saw that they have now separately published Anne Frank’s short stories in the collection Tales From the Secret Annexe I had to buy that.

It was a really strange experience going to that museum at 263 Prinsengracht, Amsterdam. You walk into a modern building added to the side of Otto Frank’s business premises, and are fed through some background info before the warehouse, then the offices, then the secret annexe, then back down to further info about the terrible fates of the annexe occupants and finally the diary itself.

Despite being crowded and hustled through it all, despite the historical rooms being empty but for photos and other documents on the walls, I found it profoundly moving. For one thing, though I had read about the exact dimensions of the annexe, it was still shocking to experience its smallness for myself. It was strange seeing the pencil marks still on the wall recording the heights of Anne and her sister Margot. And that bookcase-covered secret door, which I’d read about and even seen photos of, but to see the original was the oddest thing.

But most of all, it was the pictures still on the wall in what had been Anne’s bedroom – postcards and magazine pages showing historical figures, famous paintings, film stars, the English royal family. Most of her pictures had been removed but there are still a few dozen there, preserved behind perspex. And though it’s been years since I last read the diary, I could remember Anne writing about those pictures on her wall and how much they meant to her.

So in the next few months, with that experience fresh in my mind, I’m going to read my three new books by or about Anne Frank. It will have its depressing moments but I remember the great thing about the diary being that it’s not (for the most part) a depressing read of itself. The sadness comes when you turn the page from her last written words and read the publisher’s note about her tragic death. It’s powerful, even when you know the facts already.

Amsterdam; or holiday awesome

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So you already know that I love love loved Amsterdam and had a great time there, but what did I do that was so great? Here are some photos and notes to elaborate.

We walked around soaking in the beauty, by which I mean the friendliness, the architecture and canals, the attitude, the love for design and all those bikes! (I overheard an American tourist claiming that he’d seen loads of parked bikes but hardly anyone cycling. He had clearly not ventured beyond the central street because pretty much everywhere else in the city was solid with cyclists, even when it was raining.)

Riding

We went to some world-class museums – the Rijksmuseum, Stedelijk Museum, FOAM and Anne Frank House – to absorb art and history. You know that photo of Obama speechifying in front of The Night Watch last Monday? Yeah, we were right there in that spot two days before him.

Charity the Educator

We ate tasty food, both typically Dutch and international fare, including my first ever oysters. (Conclusion: I like them but don’t love them, though I did feel classy tipping that shell!)

The very first oysters of Kate

Also, Tim surprised me at the start of the holiday with tickets to see Cirque du Soleil, which is something I have always wanted to do and it totally lived up to expectations. There were bendy ladies! And terrifying stunts! And fancy clever acrobatics! In a tent in a car park! They rock and so does Tim.

Les tentes du cirque

Back to that love for design, there is clearly a real respect in Amsterdam for design in all quarters and this means there are lots of shops selling the most gorgeous stuff. I mean, I’m not much of a shopper and I would never go somewhere on holiday just for the shops but this was a rare case where they added something for me.

Purty things

But mostly, let’s face it, it was all about the canals and bicycles, the near lack of cars in the older areas, and the chilled atmosphere.

Amsterdam: effortlessly stylish

March reading round-up

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Woman reading, Seattle, Washington, USA, 1930s
Woman reading, 1930s. (Seattle Municipal Archives)

It’s not been my best reading month, or at least it started badly. I think I set my aim too high in the Popular Science Reading Challenge, expecting myself to read one book every month in an unfamiliar genre. Last month I struggled a little with 13 Things That Don’t Make Sense by Michael Brooks and this month I started and gave up on The Simpsons and their Mathematical Secrets by Simon Singh (I thought as a fan of The Simpsons and someone who loved maths at school it would appeal but it really really didn’t do it for me; however several people I know have read and enjoyed it so what do I know?!). I’ve revised my aim down to 6 books this year, which takes the pressure off. And might mean I actually read something from the TBR next month!

On a more positive note, I signed up to a Kickstarter called Women Destroy Science Fiction! I know, the title alone was enough without learning the details, but it turns out those are fab too! Lightspeed Magazine has been publishing science fiction short stories and related non-fiction since 2010 and they proposed an issue written and edited entirely by women, as a means of combating the tired cliché that women can’t write good SF. The campaign was so successful that they are also producing women-only issues of their sister publications Nightmare Magazine (Women Destroy Horror!) and Fantasy Magazine (Women Destroy Fantasy!). As part of my Kickstarter reward I got digital copies of some back issues of all three magazines (the women-only issues will follow later this year) and I started reading them while on holiday. So far they are excellent. I really like the way the essays are thematically linked to the stories.

Now that's a library

Speaking of holiday, we had an awesome holiday in Amsterdam this month and I still have LOADS to blog about it. I’ve sorted through about half the photos and prepared two blog posts, which is probably enough for now, but there’s lots more to say.

As if that wasn’t enough for one month, this past weekend was Bloggiesta. I had a growing todo list already for the blog so I thought it would be a good idea to take part. Unfortunately I had some problems with my FTP server and internet connection, which meant I got stuck on one of the first tasks I started for a whole day (backing up the blog). Oops. I have investigated better ways so hopefully next time it will work more smoothly.

Books read

A Spell of Winter by Helen Dunmore (review here)

Letters of a Woman Homesteader by Elinore Pruitt Stewart (review here)

The Lathe of Heaven by Ursula le Guin (review to follow)

Hawkeye Volume 1 by Matt Fraction (the hardcover, which, because comics are complicated, is a different collection from the paperback volume 1)

Short stories read

“The paper revolution” by Dinaw Mengestu (New Yorker, Jan 13, 2014)

“By fire” by Tahar Ben Jelloun (New Yorker, Sep 16, 2013)

“I’m alive, I love you, I’ll see you in Reno” by Vylar Kaftan (Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 1, June 2010)

“The Cassandra Project” by Jack McDevitt (Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 1, June 2010)

“Cats in victory” by David Barr Kirtley (Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 1, June 2010)

“Amaryllis” by Carrie Vaughan (Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 1, June 2010)

“Snapshots I brought back from the black hole” by K C Ball (Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 13, June 2011)

“Frost painting” by Carolyn Ives Gilman (Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 13, June 2011)

“Transcript of interaction between astronaut Mike Scudderman and the OnStar Hands-Free AI Crash Advisor” by Grady Hendrix (Lightspeed Magazine, Issue 13, June 2011)

“Able, baker, charlie, dog” by Stephanie Vaughn (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“The evolution of knowledge” by Niccolo Tucci (New Yorker Fiction podcast)

“The writers’ model” by Molly Giles (Selected Shorts podcast)

“Creative writing” by Etgar Keret (Selected Shorts podcast)

“On keeping a notebook” by Joan Didion (Selected Shorts podcast)

 
As I’m posting this about a minute before midnight, happy April!

It’s Bloggiesta time!

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Bloggiesta Spring 2014

Okay, the fact that Bloggiesta started on Thursday and I am only just posting about it on Saturday evening shows that I don’t have a whole four days of intensive blog updating planned, but I do have some goals for the next 24 hours and have already been hopping around looking at other people’s Bloggiesta plans and challenges.

So: what is Bloggiesta? It’s essentially a collaborative spring clean for book bloggers (except that there’s more than one per year, so they’re not all in spring, but this one is, so the analogy works this time). Some people do a complete redesign or overhaul of their site, others post useful hints and tips about blogging, most of us just tidy up a bit and have a natter on Twitter. Whatever way you use it, if you’re a blogger it’s a super useful reminder to get round to those mundane tasks or small changes you’ve been putting off or just to gather info/opinions from fellow bloggers.

Here is my to do list for this weekend, which is probably massively overambitious, as this is largely a brain dump!

1. Update my TBR with all my guilty new books I’ve bought (shame face).

2. Update my About Me page as part of the Bloggiesta Mini-Challenge: Are About Me Pages Necessary?

3. Investigate a new theme for the blog that can actually handle threaded comments and replies properly.

4. Write some notes for a review of the book I finished this morning.

5. Sort through the rest of the photos I took on holiday and process those relevant to (a) a post about Amsterdam and (b) a post about Anne Frank.

6. Write posts about Amsterdam and Anne Frank.

7. Join in at least one Bloggiesta chat on Twitter – well, I didn’t join in any official chats due to timezone difference but I did chat with other Bloggiesta folk on Twitter, which basically counts, right?

8. Back up blog (I almost forgot to include this – thank you Whitney for the reminder!) – this caused me great hassle as my blog host had changed some settings and our internet connection has been flaky this weekend, but I got there in the end! Possibly at the expense of ticking off some other things on this list, and also a little part of my sanity.

9. Update my Popular Science Reading Challenge page.

10. Read!

Sorry to non-bloggers if this is all boring. It’ll be back to business as usual come Monday, don’t worry! For fellow bloggers who haven’t yet joined in Bloggiesta, it’s not too late, see?!

Summer was departing with reluctant feet

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Letters of a Woman Homesteader

Letters of a Woman Homesteader
by Elinore Pruitt Stewart

This is something a bit unusual, and not a book I’d heard of a year ago, or one that there’s a whole lot of information about on the Internet, but it was recommended in the comments to one of my Little House reviews and it sounded like a very appropriate follow-up read, so I downloaded it to my Kindle. But then I spent a few months trying to catch up just a little bit on the teetering towers of unread (physical) books (not very successfully, I might add). It wasn’t until this month, with a few weekends away and a holiday, that I finally dusted off the Kindle and spotted this at the top of the list.

This book is essentially a memoir in the form of letters written, as the title suggests, by a woman homesteader in Wyoming in the early 20th century. Elinore, a widow, started writing to her friend and former employer, a Mrs Coney, in 1909 about the new life she was forging for herself and her daughter Jerrine in Burnt Fork. Coney started reading the letters out at social gatherings and, recognising their popular appeal, suggested she could get them a publisher. A publisher’s note at the start of the book states that little has been changed from the originals and I think this comes over in the tone.

“I am ashamed of my long letters to you, but I am such a murderer of language that I have to use it all to tell anything.”

Which makes this a perhaps not unique but certainly unusual and intriguing historical record, as well as a very well written account of an interesting life led by an intrepid woman who seems to define “can-do spirit”.

“Summer was departing with reluctant feet, unafraid of winter’s messengers, the chill winds.”

Because this is a collection of letters, details and events aren’t necessarily recounted in a logical start-to-finish way. For one thing, the relationship between the two women writing (though only Elinore’s half of the correspondence was published) clearly changes from a largely polite one to a much closer and trusting one, so a lot of the things that are more personal appear towards the end of the book, out of sequence. There also seem to be lots of questions in Coney’s letters that Elinore tries to address, and these sometimes hark back to earlier events.

(I should clarify that I am breaking my self-imposed rule of referring to authors by their surname because Elinore’s surname changes during the course of the book and also because she is a lead character as much as an author, which I think gives me some leeway.)

But what is the story? Well, Elinore says that she felt a yearning to get away from the city and live off the land and when she saw an advert about claiming land in Wyoming she knew that was for her. She initially worked as a cook and housekeeper out in Burnt Fork but filed her own claim for land and got working on it within days of her arrival, determined to prove herself. She quickly befriends the homesteading community and other “locals” and her letters are alive with social gatherings, visits and gossip. Which is no mean feat considering many of her new friends live more than a day’s ride away. There’s also some romance for Elinore (in the strictest matter-of-fact tone, unlike her accounts of others’ romances) but above all there’s adventure.

“I got sunburned, and my hands were hard, rough, and stained with machine oil, and I used to wonder how any Prince Charming could overlook all that in any girl he came to. For all I had ever read of the prince had to do with him ‘reverently kissing her lily-white hand,’ or doing some other fool trick with a hand as white as a snowflake.”

Just as I found with the Little House books, it’s sometimes hard to believe that the USA had large areas that were wild and dangerous as recently as the 20th century. Elinore, for all her common sense and practicality, is a bit of a thrill-seeker and loves to go along for the ride (or even lead the way) when there’s someone new to visit, or something new to do. She goes hunting, visits a Mormon bishop out of sheer nosiness (Burnt Fork is very near the state line with Utah) and even follows a police chase.

In some ways I feel I shouldn’t like Elinore. She’s so “just get on with it”, she’s gossipy and she shows no interest in art, books or music that I recall. She also replicates people’s accents in a slightly racist manner and I’m pretty sure she used the “n” word about a black man at one point. And yet I’d suggest it is impossible not to like her. She sees beauty in the world and in people, and proves herself a thoughtful, generous friend time and again.

“It seemed as if we were driving through a golden haze. The violet shadows were creeping up between the hills, while away back of us the snow-capped peaks were catching the sun’s last rays. On every side of us stretched the poor, hopeless desert, the sage, grim and determined to live in spite of starvation, and the great, bare, desolate buttes.”

She is also a great writer. Apparently she had supplemented her income before going out west by writing occasional newspaper articles and I wish more of her writing survived. I believe there is one further collection of letters to Mrs Coney that was published after this and I will certainly hunt that down, even though it was apparently far less successful than this first volume.

Published 1914 by Houghton Mifflin.

Source: Project Gutenberg.