Recently in Books Category
Yesterday I made my favourite soup, based on a Nigel Slater recipe. Rather than give you directions based on just what you should buy, I'll give you the organic bag/use what you have method.
A selection of summer vegetables, eg courgette, carrots, tomatoes, peppers (red and yellow, no green please), onions or shallots, and garlic. I like adding butternut as we move into autumn. Also if you add aubergine and thicken with passata you have a great pasta sauce. Leave out the passata and then this is an ovenbaked ratatouille.
So. Back to the soup.
Chop all your veggies, onions into rings, carrots diagonally, tomatoes into wedges, peppers in slices etc etc. Toss in oil or spray with a mister and roast in a big pan for about an hour at 180C.
They'll fill the room with the smell of garlic and roasted tomatoes. When you take them out the oven be ready to tip them into a big pan, and add about a litre of vegetable stock or a bit more depending how thick you like your soup and then simmer for about 20 minutes.
Last night I added two chicken leg joints to the soup as it simmered and once the chicken was cooked removed them from the soup, stripped the meat from the bone, discarded the skin and added the meat back to the soup.
To serve grate parmesan over the top, buy a loaf of turkish bread, spread thickly with butter, dunk, eat and enjoy.
Soul-food in a bowl.
I have something to say about Nigel Slater's new book, Eating for England, and it's much the same as what I said about Toast. I think his character really shines through with the recipe books, when it's other kinds of writing he comes through a bit tight-lipped spinster auntie.
For a story by someone who's definitely not tight-lipped go and read (and vote) for Jeanne (the Cooksister) at Can You Twist?, an online reality show with six bloggers writing six stories, with one ultimate winner. I love Jeanne's starting line, 'She had never regretted taking him back.'
How can you resist a story that starts with a line like that?
Nkosi, sikeleli Afrika., or in Shona, Ishe Komborera Afrika.
Concerts
On Wednesday I'm going to see R.E.M. I had Radiohead tickets because R.E.M was sold out, but thanks to marktplaats and some good luck I swapped! Funny thing, the guy that phoned me to swap had such a young voice that I thought he was a teenager. I was really expecting the door to be opened by someone's mum, but no, it was a middle-aged man. It goes with the article I read recently about how the only people who can afford to go to concerts are the middle-aged. Ehm. That says a lot about me I know.
On Saturday I checked my email early enough and got tickets for Amy McDonald (I missed her last time she was in Amsterdam) and also for Jason Mraz. A few weeks ago I got tickets for Paul Weller. So that's four! I love living in the Netherlands, it's a musical playground.
Personal Manifestos
I read on a motivational website the other day about making your own personal manifesto. Despite sounding all Chairman Mao, a personal manifesto seems like a really good idea. What are you really after? What do you want? What are your primary goals in life?
The idea is to define your goals in one sentence which you can repeat to yourself as a kind of mantra or a reminder of why you're doing thing you're doing when it's bogging you down. Or maybe just to define to yourself what you really want. If you ask most people what their goals are, they'll have some longwinded explanation (after looking away embarrassedly) about what they think they want. The key is taking that longwinded explanation, trimming all the bullshit away and leaving just the core. I'm still working on my manifesto, but I'd love to know if any of you have one.
Being good-enough
I'm struggling with the concept of not being a 'perfect' mom anymore. My kids are in daycare for 102 hours a month now. It's 102 hours that they used to be with me, albeit while we were at football, the gym, tennis lessons, at home. I doubt if much of the 102 hours was actual one on one time with me, but still, I was there. Now I'm not there at all during those 102 hours and I'm not there during the time they're asleep at night.
Perhaps it's time to revisit the concepts of Donald Winnicott's Good-Enough Mother. When I was in psychotherapy back in the mid-90s and agonising about being a 'bad parent' my psychiatrist presented me with Winnicott's work (The Child, The Family and the Outside World) as well as Alice Miller's Drama of Being a Child. I read through them and although I was able to analyse and rationalise the contents to myself I was never able to apply the concepts to my own life. Perhaps now that I'm older I'll be able to apply those concepts more effectively.
This ties in a bit to some of the things that my post on The Reader made me think about. The futility of making choices for other people and the inability I have to let go and allow those choices to happen. There's nothing harder sometimes than standing back and letting things take their course.
White and African
Still reading Blood River and I'm about half way through now. The immense grief I felt for Africa at the beginning of the book has abated a little, but I find that some passages really shriek at me. Like the one I read about how the Congo massacres in the 1960s run a black vein of fear through every white African, because we've heard about it from when we were little and it pulls on the 'them and us' divide that is instilled in us from birth.
When I was about 9 or 10 our white neighbours were held at gun point by black rebels in their house. The man was raped and tortured to death while the wife and their three kids cowered in a bathroom which was inaccesible from outside. They heard him screaming all night until he finally died at about 5 am. In the morning the party-line telephone rang and the news filtered slowly from farm to farm until finally it got to us. The first thing my mom said, standing in the passage in her candlewick dressing gown, tears streaming down her face, was 'my god, it's getting to be like the Congo here'.
Tim Butcher is quite astute in his observations about white Africans sometimes.
M bought it for me in Waterstone's last time we were there. He mentioned the book while we were reading the cover of another but couldn't remember the author and then five minutes or so later we happened to pass a shelf and there it was. So he bought it for me. Who can ignore fate when it punches you in the face like that?
It was one of those books where I cried when I reached the end because there was no more story left. Bernhard Schlink has you, the reader, living the life of Michael Berg. You feel the emotional intensity of his passion for Hanna Schmitz and his grief at the revelations that lie around the corner in every page of this book. It's a love story set against the Holocaust and the Holocaust plays a central role, yet at the same time takes a back seat as the story of Michael and Hanna unfolds. Philosophical and yet curiously spare, I thought every sentence had meaning. Sometimes I skipped back a few pages just to read them again and try to absorb the bareness of the language and the heavy meaning that lay within each one.
One of the passages in the book which touched me really deeply and made me think was one on collective guilt. As a white 'daughter of Africa', (and I say that ironically), collective guilt, or 'white guilt' is my constant companion. White guilt is ever present, yet easily negated.
How many white people from Africa distance themselves from their backgrounds by saying 'Yes, my parents are terribly racist, but I'm not like that at all!'? I know I'm guilty of this, because I truly believe I'm nothing like my parents generation, yet at the same time I am the product of my upbringing so I must accept, at some level, the similarities between me and them.
The burden of choice, made by the previous generation, regardless of their own personal involvement in that choice, weighs heavily. In a situation like that of the current Zimbabwe the pendulum eventually swings back and almost everyone who negated their background and distanced themselves from their past previously will now vociferously support the failure of black rule and quote statistics about how Zimbabwe was once the bread basket of Africa.
They, our parents, are collectively guilty of the crime of trying to protect a dream, whether ethically correct or otherwise, and we, as their descendants are collectively guilty just by the fact of being and of loving them. It's a bitter pill.
Bernhard Schlink says it better:
'I envied other students back then who had dissociated themselves from their parents and thus from the entire generation of perpetrators, voyeurs, and the wilfully blind, accomodators and accepters, thereby overcoming perhaps not their shame, but at least their suffering because of the shame. But what gave rise to the swaggering self-righteousness I so often encountered among these students? How could one feel guilt and shame, and at the same time parade one's self-righteousness? Was their dissociation of themselves from their parents mere rhetoric: sounds and noise that were supposed to drown out the fact that their love for their parents made them irrevocably complicit in their crimes?'The other questions raised in the book are philosophical and deal with the responsibility of making choices and decisions and especially those that involve others. Michael talks to his father about his dilemma with revealing the secret that could have changed the future for Hanna. His father says:
'Don't you remember how furious you would get as a little boy when Mama knew best what was good for you? Even how far one can act like this with children is a real problem. It is a philosophical problem, but philosophy does not concern itself with children. ...But with adults I unfortunately see no justification for setting other people's views of what is good for them above their own ideas of what is good for themselves. ... We're not talking about happiness, we're talking about dignity and freedom. Even as a little boy you knew the difference. It was no comfort to you that your mother was always right.'This part made me reflect on the futility of making choices for other people. There's a whole spectrum of reasons why we might make choices for someone else, from absolving them of responsibility to actually believing we might be doing the right thing. In the end doing so does nothing except strip both parties of any dignity they might have had.
This book was deeply thought-provoking and I urge you to read it. If not for the philosophy, then for the story and the extreme clarity of the language.
Links to articles about The Reader or it's author:
NY Times
The Guardian
Reviews of Bernhard Schlink's new novel, Homecoming:
The Guardian
LA Times
I'd like to read Flights of Love next, as described in this review.
The Reader on Amazon.
