Ben Coates "Why The Dutch Are Different" (Nicholas Brealey Pub.)




A quick overview of the most distinctive features of modern Dutch society, as seen by a young British professional who settled here a few years ago. Despite the "hidden heart" bit in the subtitle, it doesn't go beyond the obvious things — the Golden Age and colonialism; World War II; football; bicycles; the Zwarte Piet crisis; Pim Fortuyn, Theo Van Gogh, Ayaan Hirsi Ali and Geert Wilders; euthanasia, soft-drugs and prostitution; carnival; etc. — but what it says about them seems to be sensible and well-researched.

Nothing much about the arts, except Rembrandt and Vermeer, and not much about places other than Rotterdam (where Coates lives) and Amsterdam (where he works). Maastricht, Eindhoven and Breda appear in the Carnival chapter, and there's a trip to Westerbork in the WWII section, but that's about it for geography.

Coates isn't the most exciting writer: he has learnt one trick, building chapters by breaking up passages of objective background material with short passages of mildly funny subjective experience, and he applies that scheme doggedly throughout the book. But he is clearly good at condensing an argument to the essentials, and doesn't take up more of the reader's time than he needs to.

One minor caveat I had was that the external baseline Coates typically compares the Netherlands to is his experience of a few years in a very high-pressure job in London, which is scarcely "normal" by anyone else's standards. Perhaps because of that, he sometimes picks out characteristics as "typically Dutch" when they could equally well be called "typically German" or "typically Swedish", for example. But I still think this would be a valuable starting point for someone visiting the Netherlands or considering coming to work there.

Joan Didion "The Year of Magical Thinking" (Fourth Estate)




This is a valuable piece of writing on grief. In December 2003, her husband has a massive heart attack at the dinner table and dies. At the same time, their daughter is in ICU with pneumonia. Over the course of the next year, she goes through an emotional wringer, dealing with the grief and the health issues of her daughter. She tries to make sens of the emotions and thinking she is experiencing, by reference to her peer group, her parents' generation and reading.

I was particularly struck by the book on grief etiquette and how that has changed. Some of what she reported I recognised from the loss of my father (the shock, the bliss of forgetting and the pain of remembering, being side swiped). There is little writing on the nature of grief in the modern age, when faith is not the support it once may have been and when death is kept out of sight; this feels to be a valuable contribution to the subject.

But for those who grieve, and who go through all the changes Didion experiences, she helps us understand that this is just what it is like. Sometimes it helps to know we are not alone when we find ourselves alone.