Reading not Wednesday, 25/07
Jul. 25th, 2019 07:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
livRecently read: The cut out girl by Bart van Es. (c) 2018 Bart van Es; Pub Penguin Books 2019; ISBN 978-0-241-97872-6
My parents read The cut out girl for their Jewish book club, and were impressed and lent me their copy, which I read on my flight out to Sweden. It's well written and explores complex and tragic history sensitively.
Nine little goslings by Susan Coolidge. First published 1875.
Nine little goslings I read on the return flight, when I was travelling to the hospital where my father-in-law was seriously ill, so not surprisingly I was not in mood for serious and horrifying books. I had downloaded the Gutenberg version to my e-reader whenghoti_mhic_uait pointed out to me that there were sequels after the first three Katy books. It's definitely minor Coolidge, it tends towards the overly sentimental.
I quite strictly ration how many Holocaust books I read; basically I rarely read fictional novels at all, and only non-fiction when it's going to tell me something new beyond reiterating that millions of people were tortured, enslaved and murdered. The cut out girl, apart from coming highly recommended and winning lots of awards, seemed worth it because it's mainly focused on people who hid the protagonist and therefore saved her, as well as exploring what happened after the war. It's also original because the author is the descendant of one of the families that saved Lien, so he's writing the biography of his own foster-relative who had subsequently become estranged from his grandparents.
tCOG is written in a very literary style, which can feel a little false even though van Es is pretty honest about places where he's filled in details that Lien couldn't remember, either from other survivor accounts or from imagination. This also means the experience feels more like reading a novel than a history; there are certainly moments where the skilful writing is enjoyable even though the subject matter is grim.
It also deals very well with moral complexity; the chain of people who between them saved Lien certainly carried out extremely brave actions, but they were also flawed human beings. And it's a kind of microcosm of the complexity of making historical judgements of Dutch society during the war, the mix of active support of the Nazis, collaboration under duress, and resistance. For example, one of the couples who fostered Lien were cruel to her and treated her as an unpaid domestic, and turned a blind eye to a relative who repeatedly raped her over the course of her early teens. I felt the descriptions of the rapes were unnecessarily graphic; it's possible that Lien herself described her horrific experiences in the amount of detail the book recounts, but it came across as the author putting way too much thought into imagining the exact mechanics of how an adult man performs sexual acts on an 11-year-old.
In terms of historical facts I hadn't known the details of what happened to the few hundred Dutch Jewish children who survived the war through being fostered by non-Jewish families. Apparently it became a politically polarized issue in the Netherlands in the 1940s: should Jewish children be formally adopted by the people who had acted as their only family for several years, or should Jewish children be returned to any surviving Jewish relatives and to their own ancestral culture? I'm surprised there was no option for deciding this on a case-by-case basis, either all children should stay with their foster families, even if they were miserable, even if their birth parents had survived; or all Jewish children must live out their lives in Jewish households, even if that meant moving in with total strangers on the other side of the world and tearing up the strong family bonds that they might have formed.
The second faction won the debate, but Lien was the exception because she had no living relatives at all by 1945, and despite the political pressure against it, she was able to follow her own choice to stay with the van Es family. They had been the first to shelter her after her parents sent her away, aged 7, to try to keep her safe, and they'd had a few years of more or less normal family life until she was discovered by a pro-Nazi police officer acting as a Jew-hunter. After that she was moved around a lot, including a spell with the family who mistreated her, and spent most of the rest of the war in a state of trauma dissociation and with no real affectionate bonds at all.
The book then goes on to explore what happened afterwards, with the starting point that Lien had eventually become estranged from her foster family, and van Es wanted to understand why. He doesn't really draw any conclusions; people becoming estranged from families is something that happens, and obviously everybody was carrying unimaginable amounts of trauma. It could be because her foster-father tried to seduce her, as an adult not when she was a child living under his roof, but she still regarded him as her father. It could be because the family disapproved of her choice to marry a religious Sephardi Jew and live an active Jewish life (her family of origin had been pretty secular). It could be because they also disapproved of her eventually divorcing this man, when she had a breakdown and he was unsupportive, or of her suicide attempt as part of that breakdown. It could be a quarrel over people being invited or not invited to birthdays and funerals. It could just be that adoptive families are hard, even when they don't form in the middle of war and genocide.
The book ends with Lien living a relatively happy life, falling in love again in old age with a fellow survivor who by coincidence she'd known in primary school before the war. And obviously her willingness to be interviewed for a biography by a relative of the family she hadn't spoken to in decades could be seen as a kind of redemption. I think if this were fictional I would be annoyed with it; what does it mean to have a "happy ending" for one of the small handful of people who survived when millions of her people were murdered? But since it happened in real life and isn't contrived to make a satisfying story, it makes Lien's extremely horrifying biography somewhat easier to read.
Nine little goslings uses the frame of nursery rhymes to tell rather overly cute stories about children in different circumstances, mostly learning the uplifting moral lesson that what matters in life is being caring and connected with your family. The first of the stories is about Katy Carr's little sister Johnnie, and is probably the strongest of the book, but I was somewhat hoping for more sequel to Katy.
Other than that there's one of those terrible sentimental Victorian stories about a beautiful child who dies young in a horrible accident, and one I quite liked about a girl in a somewhat abusive family who finds her own strength and is eventually adopted into a better family (very much in the Frances Hodgson Burnett vein). The variant on that theme in Lady Queen Anne is pretty dire, though; it's about a grand Southern family tragically brought low by the Civil War, and a perfect little angel of a girl who remains cheerful despite not having the lifestyle she was used to on a plantation with Negro slaves [sic], and eventually is adopted by a rich couple in England because obviously her high birth and attractive manners mean she deserves a life of luxury.
Basically this kept me distracted through a rather miserable trip, but I wouldn't strongly recommend it even if you're a Coolidge fan.
Currently reading: A deeper season by![[archiveofourown.org profile]](https://p.dreamwidth.org/b164c54b26e4/-/archiveofourown.org/favicon.ico)
lightgetsin and sahiya.
A deeper season is part of a long series of an AU of Bujold's Vorkosigan series, diverging after Memory because it has Gregor in love with Miles. I'd actually read it before but had forgotten where I was up to in the series. It's pretty unusual for me to read a romance that reminds me of my own relationships, but this one does even though I don't totally buy Miles/Gregor in canon.
Rereading a very well-written Bujold fanfic was very soothing during the second part of the difficult journey home, but I think I might not finish it, I might skip to the sequel, What passing bells, now I realize I have already read aDS.
Up next: If not What passing bells then probably The storm keeper's island by Catherine Doyle, which I have borrowed from Judith.
My parents read The cut out girl for their Jewish book club, and were impressed and lent me their copy, which I read on my flight out to Sweden. It's well written and explores complex and tragic history sensitively.
Nine little goslings I read on the return flight, when I was travelling to the hospital where my father-in-law was seriously ill, so not surprisingly I was not in mood for serious and horrifying books. I had downloaded the Gutenberg version to my e-reader when
ghoti_mhic_uait pointed out to me that there were sequels after the first three Katy books. It's definitely minor Coolidge, it tends towards the overly sentimental.I quite strictly ration how many Holocaust books I read; basically I rarely read fictional novels at all, and only non-fiction when it's going to tell me something new beyond reiterating that millions of people were tortured, enslaved and murdered. The cut out girl, apart from coming highly recommended and winning lots of awards, seemed worth it because it's mainly focused on people who hid the protagonist and therefore saved her, as well as exploring what happened after the war. It's also original because the author is the descendant of one of the families that saved Lien, so he's writing the biography of his own foster-relative who had subsequently become estranged from his grandparents.
tCOG is written in a very literary style, which can feel a little false even though van Es is pretty honest about places where he's filled in details that Lien couldn't remember, either from other survivor accounts or from imagination. This also means the experience feels more like reading a novel than a history; there are certainly moments where the skilful writing is enjoyable even though the subject matter is grim.
It also deals very well with moral complexity; the chain of people who between them saved Lien certainly carried out extremely brave actions, but they were also flawed human beings. And it's a kind of microcosm of the complexity of making historical judgements of Dutch society during the war, the mix of active support of the Nazis, collaboration under duress, and resistance. For example, one of the couples who fostered Lien were cruel to her and treated her as an unpaid domestic, and turned a blind eye to a relative who repeatedly raped her over the course of her early teens. I felt the descriptions of the rapes were unnecessarily graphic; it's possible that Lien herself described her horrific experiences in the amount of detail the book recounts, but it came across as the author putting way too much thought into imagining the exact mechanics of how an adult man performs sexual acts on an 11-year-old.
In terms of historical facts I hadn't known the details of what happened to the few hundred Dutch Jewish children who survived the war through being fostered by non-Jewish families. Apparently it became a politically polarized issue in the Netherlands in the 1940s: should Jewish children be formally adopted by the people who had acted as their only family for several years, or should Jewish children be returned to any surviving Jewish relatives and to their own ancestral culture? I'm surprised there was no option for deciding this on a case-by-case basis, either all children should stay with their foster families, even if they were miserable, even if their birth parents had survived; or all Jewish children must live out their lives in Jewish households, even if that meant moving in with total strangers on the other side of the world and tearing up the strong family bonds that they might have formed.
The second faction won the debate, but Lien was the exception because she had no living relatives at all by 1945, and despite the political pressure against it, she was able to follow her own choice to stay with the van Es family. They had been the first to shelter her after her parents sent her away, aged 7, to try to keep her safe, and they'd had a few years of more or less normal family life until she was discovered by a pro-Nazi police officer acting as a Jew-hunter. After that she was moved around a lot, including a spell with the family who mistreated her, and spent most of the rest of the war in a state of trauma dissociation and with no real affectionate bonds at all.
The book then goes on to explore what happened afterwards, with the starting point that Lien had eventually become estranged from her foster family, and van Es wanted to understand why. He doesn't really draw any conclusions; people becoming estranged from families is something that happens, and obviously everybody was carrying unimaginable amounts of trauma. It could be because her foster-father tried to seduce her, as an adult not when she was a child living under his roof, but she still regarded him as her father. It could be because the family disapproved of her choice to marry a religious Sephardi Jew and live an active Jewish life (her family of origin had been pretty secular). It could be because they also disapproved of her eventually divorcing this man, when she had a breakdown and he was unsupportive, or of her suicide attempt as part of that breakdown. It could be a quarrel over people being invited or not invited to birthdays and funerals. It could just be that adoptive families are hard, even when they don't form in the middle of war and genocide.
The book ends with Lien living a relatively happy life, falling in love again in old age with a fellow survivor who by coincidence she'd known in primary school before the war. And obviously her willingness to be interviewed for a biography by a relative of the family she hadn't spoken to in decades could be seen as a kind of redemption. I think if this were fictional I would be annoyed with it; what does it mean to have a "happy ending" for one of the small handful of people who survived when millions of her people were murdered? But since it happened in real life and isn't contrived to make a satisfying story, it makes Lien's extremely horrifying biography somewhat easier to read.
Nine little goslings uses the frame of nursery rhymes to tell rather overly cute stories about children in different circumstances, mostly learning the uplifting moral lesson that what matters in life is being caring and connected with your family. The first of the stories is about Katy Carr's little sister Johnnie, and is probably the strongest of the book, but I was somewhat hoping for more sequel to Katy.
Other than that there's one of those terrible sentimental Victorian stories about a beautiful child who dies young in a horrible accident, and one I quite liked about a girl in a somewhat abusive family who finds her own strength and is eventually adopted into a better family (very much in the Frances Hodgson Burnett vein). The variant on that theme in Lady Queen Anne is pretty dire, though; it's about a grand Southern family tragically brought low by the Civil War, and a perfect little angel of a girl who remains cheerful despite not having the lifestyle she was used to on a plantation with Negro slaves [sic], and eventually is adopted by a rich couple in England because obviously her high birth and attractive manners mean she deserves a life of luxury.
Basically this kept me distracted through a rather miserable trip, but I wouldn't strongly recommend it even if you're a Coolidge fan.
Currently reading: A deeper season by
A deeper season is part of a long series of an AU of Bujold's Vorkosigan series, diverging after Memory because it has Gregor in love with Miles. I'd actually read it before but had forgotten where I was up to in the series. It's pretty unusual for me to read a romance that reminds me of my own relationships, but this one does even though I don't totally buy Miles/Gregor in canon.
Rereading a very well-written Bujold fanfic was very soothing during the second part of the difficult journey home, but I think I might not finish it, I might skip to the sequel, What passing bells, now I realize I have already read aDS.
Up next: If not What passing bells then probably The storm keeper's island by Catherine Doyle, which I have borrowed from Judith.
(no subject)
Date: 2019-07-31 02:25 am (UTC)