Until a few days ago, I was writer-in-residence in Amsterdam for the Dutch Foundation of Literature and gorging on the incredible feast of Dutch non-fiction about the contemporary world. And yes, I mean world: There is something about the way the Dutch approach current politics that is daring, thoughtful, open-minded and critical, yet completely non-judgmental.
Maybe another way of putting that is that Dutch non-fiction writers are tough-minded but not cynical, and their work has been knocking my socks off. You feel they are opening the world to you as it is, not as you want it to be, and their insights are both shocking and life-giving. Their astonishing books make me want to stop writing novels and return to journalism, where I started out.
Many readers know Ian Buruma (author of Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo Van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance). But I am also discovering Joris Luyendijk, author of People Like Us: Misrepresenting the Middle East, which has provocative things to say about how Western journalists reinforce Arab stereotypes.
Then there's the extraordinary Geert Mak, author of Amsterdam and In Europe: Travels Through the Twentieth Century. Mak writes from a personal viewpoint, backed by extensive research. An earlier book, Jorwend: The Death of the Village in Late Twentieth Century Europe, is an account of his father's village in the province of Friesland in the Netherlands.
My apartment was above one of Amsterdam's great bookstores, the Athenaeum Boekhandel and Nieuwscentrum. I read in the afternoon in my fourth-floor apartment in a canal house, listening to the crowds starting to gather at the cafés on Spuistraat below, the summer sunlight streaming in my 16th-century windows. Sometimes, I would go down and join them and read on the bench by the famous statue of the Amsterdam street urchin.
Susan Swan's most recent novel is What Casanova Told Me.
