Reviews and Comments

Tiger Eyes: a story of the future

Non-Dutch readers might know Tonke Dragt as the author of "The Letter for the King", a book which has recently been adapted into a Netflix series (...which I haven't watched.) This is probably also her most famous and beloved book over here. It even received a prize for being the best Dutch children's novel of the past fifty years. She also wrote science fiction for a slightly older audience - what we'd now call YA- and this book is one of those novels.

I'll just say a little bit about her life, because it's so interesting; She was born in what at the time was still the Dutch East Indies, and spend her early teens in an internment camp for Dutch women and children during the Japanese invasion of the country. It was during these years that she started writing, on bits of stolen toilet paper according to the bio in one of her books. You can imagine that stuck with me as a child.

Tiger Eyes is sequel to an older novel, which was published before scientists knew that the surface of Venus was a barren wasteland. Maybe it's therefore her youth in the tropics that led her to imagine the planet as home to a lush, gigantic rainforest "of towering heights and miles across". This in contrast to her vision of future Earth; a dense urban sprawl, dotted by the occasional nature reserve. We all have robotic domestic servants, and rain is scheduled to only fall at night. Tigers are extinct, and anything truly wild and dangerous has to be found off-planet.

Am I finally of that age where I can genuinely appreciate a work of "real literature" or is this book just really that good, like everyone who recommended it to me said it was? Considering its age, this book feels like a surprisingly modern with themes that, if anything, have only become more relevant. Language and culture shock, anxiety and parental pressures, dealing with the "what-ifs" of life. These are nice, easily identifiable themes. Which doesn't mean that Hermans' approach isn't nuanced, it just means that you feel very smart when you realize "Ah! Here he's talking about the struggle between Man and Nature!" Which is another strong theme. One of the book's best qualities are how Hermans' writing makes you feel the desolation and eerie, dangerous beauty of the Lapland landscape.

The only thing that makes it feel very of its time are the really... iffy comments towards black people. It's strange, since Hermans does brilliantly dissect the myth of the great European explorer, who conveniently forgets to mention all the locals who led the way and carried the provisions. And the way he contrasts how the indigenous Sami people thrive in this hostile landscape with the efforts of the educated scientist main characters to survive in the high north also doesn't seem very consistent with anti-blackness. You'd think that someone with enough sense to recognize colonialist attitudes and reject them, would not also perpetuate the condescending ideas about blackness in those passages.

Our first person narrator and protagonist is a bit of a dickhead though, so maybe that's why.

I am really picky when it comes to depictions of the Fair Folk in modern fiction. I often find that authors either make them too twee, or go too far in the other direction and make them too evil. Personally I prefer my fairies to be Strange - capital S. My favorite conceptualizations don't really think of them as either good or evil, but simply so different from humans, with such different ideas of what is polite, or valuable or moral, that they can't help but hurt us. This is a very delicate balance to strike. Brian Froud gets it right, I think, but my favorite interpretation of the Gentry is the late great Terry Pratchett. This book, however, comes close. It comes very close. Feist can't resist explaining the Fae just a little bit too much, and also relies just a little bit too much on the Seelie/Unseelie dichotomy - which in my opinion often drifts into the very human tendency to categorize and label and divide into binaries, which is very antithetical to how I like the little folk to be. They're not quite Strange, but at least he manages to teeter beautifully on that edge between good and evil.

When it comes to pacing, though, he could've definitely spend a lot less time on the set-up. We're all here for the faeries, but instead the first 300 pages or so are mostly soap opera fare, with an occasional sprinkle of supernatural menace. More menace earlier on, please!

So, I've arrived at a point in the book where the main character seems to be fully doomed, and I'm afraid to go on reading. Because, oops, somewhere along the way I started to care about the guy.

Alfred, who aspires to be a great geologist after his scientist father died when he was a child, travels into the wilderness with three Norse students to do field work in the Arctic circle during the time of the midnight sun. He is intensely anxious and has an intense inferiority complex that's encouraged by his travel group's competency in an environment with which he is unfamiliar. I like to think I wouldn't be too proud to tap out in time, like Alfred, but my god, his emotions are uncomfortably recognizable to me.

The part where the book really started to click for me is a chapter early on that discusses English as the scientific (and artistic) lingua franca. Unless your main language is English, or to a lesser extent, one of the other "big" languages (French, German, Spanish), most scientific literature will never be translated into your language. Many great literary works won't be either. You have to learn another language to access them. This means that anything written in English is automatically cast in a light of authority and worldliness. While the own language seems boorish. The language of the everyday. Buying groceries and talking about the weather, not a language of art, philosophy and science. And this book was written in the '60s! If the multiple guys I've known who went through a "I don't wanna speak Dutch, because English is the superior language" phase are to be believed - this has only become more true. It really hit home with me, since I'm doing an international Master's programme and working in a position where I mostly speak English. I live in the Netherlands, but spend most days communicating in a different language. Partly that's on me, after all, I'm writing this in English too, but it's still a strange experience.

Language is an overarching theme throughout this book, with one of the issues that Alfred has to deal with being communication issues between himself and his Norse-speaking companions. One thing I really like about those passages is that I feel that Hermans has really captured how ESL speakers speak among each other. People kind of stop caring about their accents, or having perfect grammar. Words of their first language start to sneak into exlamations and short sentences. The goal of speaking the language "like a native" is thrown out the window in favor of using it almost as a crude tool to hack away with at the communication barrier. It's kind of fun actually.

If highly recommend this book to anyone who's interested in the topics of feminism, women's rights and Islam. It skillfully circumvents the Western tendencies to either paint all Muslim women as oppressed doormats and all Muslim men as patriarchal brutes, as well as the tendency sometimes seen in more liberal spaces to refuse to acknowledge the religious oppression of women in Arabic countries entirely. And it does it while being an accessible and beautifully written memoir, rather than a dry academic text!

This book broadened my perspective so much by mentioning Muslim feminist thinkers (male and female) that I'd never heard of before. (This is the sort of book in which you do NOT skip the footnotes.) While Mernissi is a little child who feels the pressure to fulfill her mother's wish to be "a modern woman", most of the other characters are her family members of an older generation. Divorced women, women who live in a harem, are concubines, or former enslaved people. Though largely illiterate, they are smart and self-possessed, and they crave stories about Muslim women with more freedom and power than they have. Some of the most interesting and strong women in the book are the nine wives/concubines of Mernissi's grandfather.

There's a lot of passages that feel like little covert critiques of the space Western (especially second wave) feminism affords to sensuality, beauty, romance, polygamy (she's not a fan) and magic and that's very valuable too.

It's a funny coincidence, I ended my year with a book written by a female Moroccan author, and I started it with a book of poems from another Moroccan woman. She was probably about two decades old when Mernissi was born, so their lives overlapped too. I'm definitely going to review her work, too. It's just too interesting to not talk about.

"The hidden rooftop terrace"

A memoir from Fatima Mernissi about her youth growing up in the last harem in Morocco. (A harem, byt the way, is technically just the women's section of a building, not the sultan's private brothel, as it's sometimes presented in the West. That's an orientalist myth, that originated during colonialism. However, these women are still essentially imprisoned in these harems, as they need permission to leave, and there's literally a guard stationed at the door. Which is pretty terrible.) I didn't know about her before picking this up, but she's a sociologist who has written much about islam from a feminist perspective.

A few pages in, and I really like this work. It's beautifully written, and the way she portrays her female family members lends depth and complexity to them as Muslim women, a group so often flattened into caricatures. They're very aware of the sexism in their society, and the stricts limits on their freedom, and struggle against it in their own way, through intelligence, social skills and art.

My new train-read! Anja Meulenbelt is probably the Netherlands' most well-known and controversial author of the second wave feminist movement, and I read my mom's copy of her debut novel as a teen. So, when I found this book in a little free library I had to pick it up. A semi-autobiographical novel about the titulair character's unsuccesful attempt at a polyamorous relationship with her long-time girlfriend and new beau, a man. Rather than implode dramatically, what I can tell from the first few chapters is that the love simply slowly peters out due to petty jealousies and logistics. As I remember her from her other novel, the tone is conversational, wry.* A friend talking through her love life over coffee. Fun little detail: almost every character in this book seems to have cats, and Meulenbelt never neglects to update us on where their loyalties lie, haha. She knows her audience, because, yes, I would like to know the cats' opinion in all this.

*On the back cover: "Is there love after feminism? We're an improbable couple. He's a man, I am a woman. That's already quite a handicap for any decent relationship."