This post doesn’t live here anymore. It emigrated to my other blog:
The Big No-No: An Outsider on American Fascism,
where it resides under the title:
“Familiar Imagery from Dutch History, Culture and Politics in The Assault“
What Folks Have Been Reading
WHAT I HAVE BEEN READING
In the late 60s Richard Proenneke built his own cabin in the Alaskan wilderness with only a few simple tools. He spent most of the rest of his life there. Sam Keith fleshed out Proenneke's diary of his first 16 months, when he was making his home by a lake. I love these kinds of books!
An old Oji-Cree healer and her nephew canoe down a river in Canada, away from the world of white people. They both have to come to terms with their past. The woman has lost most of her tribe and the young man is traumatized from his recent experience in the Belgian trenches of World War One. My second book by Boyden. Can't say enough about him.
An incredibly comprehensive history of everything related to slavery in the Southern United States, from the beginning of the colonies to the end of the Civil War. Over 700 pages and I took over 30 pages of notes. I will be sharing over many posts to come!
Hamid's debut novel. I love this author. A young man in Lahore, Pakistan, is the victim of love, drugs, obsession, the class system and his complete lack of self-awareness.
A golem, created in Poland and brought to life on a ship to America, and a jinni who was trapped in a flask a thousand years ago and released in New York -- the most unusual immigrants you'll ever meet.
The only part of her life a Korean woman can control is her body, so she withdraws into it. Harrowing.
Autobiography lightly disguised as a novel about the son of Southern migrants growing up on the streets of Harlem, New York City, in the 1940s and 50s. Written like you're hearing the whole story in a bar. Quite a feat.
The story of a man struggling to make a living in Morocco. No plot, no clearly defined characters, but fascinating in its authenticity.
Pakistani man tells an American about his experience as a college student and employee of an assessment firm in America years ago. Smart, nuanced and pretty darn honest considering the unreliable narrator.
Wow! The answer to the inane platitudes about how all parents love their children and how children should always respect their parents. The protagonist must come to terms with his deeply flawed immigrant parents in order to change himself.
Seven short stories about life during the Kim Il-sung regime, by a writer who still lives and works in North Korea, were smuggled out of the country and translated. Mind-boggling stuff.
A 15-year-old autistic narrator wants to know who killed a neighbor's dog, and ends up much further out of his comfort zone than he planned. Wonderful read!
In politics, education, religion, agriculture, business--it turns out that dumbing down has been here from the start.
Fifty years of Istanbul seen through the eyes of a street vendor who migrates to the city as a young boy. It's also a window into the complicated dance between men and women in Turkey.
Hey, don't laugh, at least I'm trying.
A Norwegian immigrant is cooped up with six other people on a tiny island off the coast of Maine all winter in 1873. A woman in the present researching the Norwegian immigrant is cooped up with three other people on a tiny sailboat. What could possibly go wrong?
A man stuck between two worlds in more ways than one. Fascinating!
Historical novel about early contacts between first nations and the French in Canada. Beautifully written story that doesn't pull any punches. I bought his other two novels right away.
Beautifully written. By my children's favorite English and Creative Writing teacher! It's got rave reviews and we're all very proud of her.
Suki Kim is a Korean-American journalist. She poses as an evangelical Christian posing as an English teacher at a school for the sons of North Korea's elite. Her experience and the information she manages to get via writing assignments are incredible. Definitely a lot more eye-opening that any CNN special.
This. Explains. Everything!!!
Why has Islam not undergone a reformation like Christianity? Why is it so easy for Islamic extremist groups like IS to recruit young muslims? What would it take for Islam in fundamentalist Islamic countries to enter modernity? Does the West have a role to play?
Amazing! A man wanders endlessly through a dreamscape, becoming other people, himself in the past, everything is fluid. Kafkaesque disconnect between people and their different needs.
A multi-layered novel about the history of Libya. A fast read, but one you can repeat and find something new each time.
Twelve Americans go missing in Burma/Myanmar during a tour. Touching and hilarious, but mostly hilarious.
The most unusual murder mystery I've ever read. Incredible writing. It haunted me for days.
The quote on the front mentions that these stories are exhilerating. I couldn't disagree more. They are almost unbearably painful to read, and yet I couldn't put them down. Very well done, apart from the third story, which is written in the second tense. Please let me know if you know of ONE story that works in second tense.
Resident Alien -- Being Dutch in America 
I’m reviewing these wonderful posts as I prepare to teach the novel (again) to this year’s Honors World Literature classes. Perhaps I’ve missed it, but I was looking here for a reference to the “Prologue.” Some of the most memorable images are there: the man poling his boat along the canal, and the overlapping herringbone patterns of the wake. I can’t be sure, from the translation, but it seems to me that both are symbols of history: the complexity of the patterns, where the strands are interwoven; and the man moving forward in time and space, but looking backward into the past–if, indeed, Dutch canal boats are propelled in this way?
LikeLike
Yes, they used to be. So the man is facing backwards, starts poling at the front of the boat and walks toward the back with the pole, until he pulls it out of the water, walks back to the front to do it all again. I mention somewhere that Mulisch said in an interview that history lessons should start with yesterday’s newspaper instead of with the Mesopotamians. Starting at the present and going back, in order to understand history’s relevance, in order to move forward as a society.
I mention the prolog in the third post about The Assault. Yes, the V’s are affected by the next V’s moving in the opposite direction. Everything affects everything else, until it all becomes choppy before it smoothes out. First Anton describes the poled barges, then the occasional sailboat, and then the motorboats, described as almost violent in the way they don’t use nature to move forward, the way they disturb the water for so long afterward. So the motorboats are like the Nazis. Also, he describes the V’s as turning upside down, like a labda (though not in the translation–grrr). A labda has many meanings, but here’s a link to an interesting one. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cosmological_constant
I’m sure Mulisch knew of this meaning, as he talks often about astronomy and universal time.
The prolog also mentions Beumer sometimes reading from The Three Musketeers to Anton. The Three Musketiers refers to the popular type of historical novel that Mulisch didn’t write: history as merely a backdrop for an adventure story, a stand-alone thing that has no relevance for our modern times. Just entertainment.
I also mention the prolog briefly at the end of the last post, comparing the water in the canal (which could be compared to the Walter Scott’s river that is never exactly the same) to the demonstration cutting through Amsterdam in 1981.
I hope this helps. I’m also curious what made you teach The Assault. I always felt that the book was kind of lost to literature in the English-speaking world because of the translation, but these posts are read every single day somewhere. I’m amazed and so glad. I just wish Mulish was alive to know it.
LikeLike
Not to be too pushy about my other posts, but here’s a post I wrote recently that relates to the demonstrations of 1981 and ’83.
https://residentalien.co/?s=cold+war
LikeLike