The Black Lake, by Hella S. Haasse

This is a very beautiful book, about childhood and coming of age, but mostly about colonialism amd how it affects human relationships. How poisonous it was, how it shaped people's minds and created so much unnecessary suffering.

And the writing is beautiful, I leave here just a small sample:

We continued splashing about for some time, out of habit, and likely out of a sense of awkwardness too, but without anything like our old jollity. The difference was now we saw it all – the bathing, the rocks in the river, the sparkling current – with different eyes, eyes that had lost the ability to see the real world as a world of wonder. Gone was the magical kingdom in which we were the heroes and explorers. The mysterious grottos were nothing but deep shadows beneath overhanging foliage, our old hunting ground of rocky plateaus and unbridgeable rapids only a mountain stream coursing over its bed of gravel and jutting stones. Crabs and dragonflies, a-shimmer with alluring colours, shot away under and over the surface, but they no longer took our breath away, for all that we made to chase them in the old spirit of rivalry. As we lay on our backs to dry on a slab of rock, the true significance of these changes flashed through my mind. I glanced at Oeroeg, and saw the same discovery in his eyes. A sense of finality. We were children no longer.

I am glad I picked this book, along with a few others, at the Paagman Bookstore at The Hague. It's always nice to find good fiction, it's one of the pleasures I get from travelling.

A Curva do Rio, de V.S. Naipaul

This is a wonderful book. I read it i a very good Portuguese translation, that's faithful to its pared down style. From what I've heard from a few friends that have worked in Africa, this is an extremely accurate portrait - a perfect example of what my friends and the people I knew in Madagascar referred to as TIA : this is Africa. The author manages to give us an insightful portrait without being judgemental or stereotypical.

I totally recommend it.

Portrait of a marriage - or a 60 years war

My grandparents were married on the January 30th 1930. He was 26, she was 16. They had met just a few months earlier, my grandfather had arrived in the village from Lisbon, after an ad of a pharmacy for sale, which he was short of money to buy. Then he met this ageing alcoholic barber surgeon, who was worried about his only daughter’s future in case he died. Somehow, the old man liked and trusted the young pharmaceutic, so he lent him the money to buy the pharmacy and gave him his daughter in marriage. Nobody asked her opinion, women in Portugal at the time didn’t have any right to decide about their lives.

It was a disastrous marriage ever since the beginning. My grandmother always said: “I didn’t marry, I was married off!”. And my grandfather said he knew his wife was bad-tempered (torta, was the term he used) just 3 days after the wedding – they were supposed to go to their farming plot and it was raining and cold, so he and his father-in-law thought they’d better stay at home, but she said “Since you made me wake up so early, now we’re going!”.

I can’t imagine how traumatic it must have been to this girl, used to run her father’s household since childhood (her mother had died when she was just 5 years old), to suddenly being subjected to a husband’s authority, having to ask him for money to attend to everyday’s needs, and watching him dilapidate the family goods in foolish agricultural works, becoming indebted and selling her mother’s gold jewels and disregarding her elderly father, who she worshipped, as a worthless drunkard.

I also cannot imagine how their intimate life would be. I remember how my grandmother, even if she loved romantic novels, used to say, watching kisses on television: “How disgusting!”. And I also remember my grandfather telling me – “Now you’re old enough to know it” – how he stopped having intercourse with his wife after their fourth child’s birth, because the doctor said it would be dangerous for her.
He wished his children to marry local farmers, she was the one who supported them to go to college and get degrees so they could have a better life. She would steal small amounts from the household accounts so she could help her children at university. And she succeeded - their children got a college education and became quite successful in their professions.

At some time, her children tried to convince her to leave her husband and live on her own, but she never wanted to even consider that, she felt bound to her duties as a wife, however disagreeable they might be.

I remember the constant arguments between my grandparents; at the time I thought them funny, but then I understood how unhappy they were together, and felt sad about it. How sad is a decades old unhappy marriage? There were so many petty things, like the way my grandfather kept the household accounts in sheets of paper, so he could control his wife's spending. We as children didn't understand how much suffering this must have caused her, and joked behinnd their backs about their constant bickering. We actually enjoyed how he made her mad at lunch telling jokes that she would find disrespectful, after all he was funnier than she was. Later, I understood, and felt bad about it.
She would knit quilts and table cloths to make some money on the side, money she used to help their children through college and later to have some financial independence. She was only financially secure when he sold the pharmacy - he gave the money to their children, who immediately gave it back to her, without him knowing.

They lived in a big house, with an outdoors kitchen in the garden. So in their late years, they lived totally separate lives - he would cook his meals in the outdoors kitchen and they spent several days without even seeing each other. Once, my grandmother went away to visit her son for a few days. My grandfather, after not seeing her for a few days, asked their neighbours about her; when they said they didn't know where she was, he became extremely upset, saying "OMG, what shall I tell my children? How will I justify their mother's disappearance?" Of course, my grandmother was delighted when she knew about this.

Later, when heart failure kept my grandfather bedridden, he still tried to be independent from her, and asked a friend to bring him his meals to his room, but she didn't even open the door, saying that she was perfectbly able to take care of her husband. And she did take care of him, probably delighted to finally have him at her mercy.

How sad is that? There was a kind of justice there, but still it seems to me so... cruel. I guess that was the way it went with marriages before divorce became available and acceptable. Having watched this wreck of a marriage, I cannot but approve of divorce, thinking how much better their lives could have been.

Travels with Virginia Woolf, edited by Jan Morris

An interesting read, but a bit disappointing. But still it's always nice to read Virginia Woolf's prose, and there were several texts I didn't know. She was not a great traveller, so this book - a collection of texts mostly from diaries and letters - is mostly a curio, a small pleasure for her admirers - one of whom I am, of course.

I think what I liked less was the editing - I wouldn't have organised the texts by place, as Jan Morris did, I think the collection would be much more interesting and expressive of her mind and feelings about the places if they were organised chronologically. Jan Morris says in the introduction:

"What one records is really the state of one's own mind." Precisely that is the fascination of these writings. They are seldom descriptions of place, they are records of the effect of place upon a particular sensibility, one of the most finely tuned imaginable. The earliest piece here was written in 1897, when the writer was fifteen, the latest in 1940, when she was fifty-eight, and there is inevitably a vast difference in the style and approach.

And precisely because of that evolution in her style and approach, I believe the book would be more coherent and enjoyable if it followed her impressions along her life, which is also a kind of travel through time that inevitably influences what one gets from travels through space.

That said, I enjoyed it very much, especially the parts about Greece, her description of Epidaurus reminded me so much of my own visit there.

...but if statues & marble are solid to the touch, so, simply, are words resonant to the ear.

A short trip to Holland

After too many months homebound, I felt the urge to travel somewhere again, so I booked a flight to Holland in an impulse. I had been in Amsterdam twice before, so this time I booked a hotel at The Hague, from where I could take the train to other cities and also see the famous tulip season.

The Hague is a beautiful city. I arrived on a Saturday, and there were lots of people celebrating in the streets, with orange hats and garlands, I later knew it was a big national holiday, the King's Day. I spent all afternoon walking around the city, enjoying its lively squares lined with cafés, its lovely architecture - the Binnenhof, the Peace Palace, the many nice shops.

The next day I headed to Amsterdam, to meet a Facebook friend - I like to know my Facebook friends live, I have met several interesting people this way who became good friends. While waiting, I strolled along the canals of this most beautiful city, and visited the Rembrandthuis and the Portuguese Synagogue, passing by the sleazy Red Light District, that I always found more depressing than exciting.

The Rembrandthuis is a wonderful museum - the epoch reconstitution is excellent, the studio is especially interesting, with the pigments used to make the colours and the several props for the paintings. The prints and paintings collection is also beautiful and most informative about the painter and his times.

The Portuguese Synagogue is most impressive, it gives one the notion of how prosperous the Jewish people expelled from Portugal were, and it's funny to read the Portuguese words on the inscriptions.

Then my friend showed up, and we had a wonderful time, talking and walking along the canals and the Vandelpark. Several streets were reeking of urine from the huge amounts of beer that had certainly been drank on the holiday, and the locals only started showing up on the streets by mid-afternoon. The Hockney exhibition at the Van Gogh Museum was sold out, so I couldn't see it - too bad, but nevermind, I don't care about these minor setbacks on holidays.

We ended the day with a great Indonesian dinner at a nice restaurant - I had never tasted Indonesian cuisine, and I loved it, a perfect blend of spicy and sweet dishes.

I visited Delft the following morning - another beautiful Dutch city, with canals, lovely façades and churches, the Vermeer centre interesting, although not nearly as much as the sight of his original paintings, as I could confirm that same afternoon at The Hague. I didn't climb the church tower due to my fear of heights, but enjoyed visiting the church anyway, and then sat at a café terrace in the square reading and writing - one of the great pleasures while travelling.

Back at The Hague, I visited the Mauritshuis - definitely the high point of the trip. It hosts a wonderful collection, not only the uberfamous Girl with a Pearl Earring and The Anatomy Lesson. So many masterpieces in such a small museum, it's really mindblowing. I finally was able to see the View of Delft by Vermeer, one of the first paintings I knew by him, and that became so associated with Proust - but still couldn't find the small yellow pane so loved by Swann.

Happily filled with great art, I walked around the city and finished the day with a drink at one of the Plein café terraces, enjoying the sunset of a beautiful sunny day.

The next day I headed to Leiden, to catch the bus to see the tulips at the Keukenhof Gardens. The sky was grey, so I decided to visit Leiden first, since the weather forecast said it would be sunnier later.

Leiden is another beautiful city, and I would have liked to have the time to visit more of its museums - I just visited the Pieterskerk and the Antiquities Museum. The church is grandiose and has several most interesting tombs; the museum has an outstanding Egyptian collection and many beautiful Greek vases and Minoan artifacts.

I had a Dutch lunch of meat croquettes, a little heavy for my taste, before I took the bus to Keukenhof. The garden is really beautiful, there were lots of tourists but the place was big enough to allow one to enjoy it. There were tulips galore, of all colours and shapes, and many beautiful daffodils as well. The pavilions were a little tacky, with its decorations themed on "peace and love" 1960s style, but still with many remarkably beautiful orchids and lilies. Unfortunately, the bulb fields were already stripped of flowers, it was one of the sights I longed to see - too bad, another minor setback.

I spent the last morning at The Hague visiting a few great bookstores, and buying Dutch books - seven, and there were so many more I felt like having, but I had to restrain myself. I highly recommend Paagman, the American Book Centre and Stanza to any book lover.

And so ended my short Holland trip, I was glad I took it, and it made me wish to travel again, as soon as possible.

Where Reasons End, by Yiyun Li

A beautiful and moving book about loss and mourning. Written in a sad tone, but never cheesy, one can feel the sorrow but also the resentment of the narrator facing something she cannot understand and accept - and we never understand either, because the son's act is never explained, and his voice is not really his, but his mother's perception of him, incomplete as it must be. This is one of the great strengths of the book, in my opinion, the way we can never really know what goes on in other people's minds, even the ones closest to us, and how we try to fill in the gaps with whatever we feel we know of them, to try to make sense of their actions that hurt us most, or at least to build a plausible story that can help us to deal with the pain.