I want to see Amsterdam. Which reminds me that Ian McEwan has a book called Amsterdam which I saw in the library today when I was pottering around the M section but didn't take out. I was there to get Mulisch's The Procedure (about Genetics, Rabbi Loew's Golem and writing.) I realise that there is a disproportionally large number of books on my reading list that are Holocaust-related, W.G.Sebald and Primo Levi and Anne Michaels to but name a few. Also I saw nasi goreng in The Discovery of Heaven! How funny! These Dutch writers are making me interested in the Dutch part of Indonesian history again. Nooteboom's Rituals had mentions of Indonesian food too. I guess I've never really thought about the sort of influence Indonesia had on the Netherlands, or about Indonesian cultural presence in the Netherlands today. Actually, I don't think about the Netherlands at all, who by the way didn't even make it into the World Cup this year, how disgraceful! I think I still have my Indonesian history notes from RGS somewhere, I remember vaguely the Liberal Policy and the Ethical Policy. And wasn't there some van Deventer fellow who wrote an article or something about the moral duty of the Dutch to their colonies? Something about Debt of Honour? I should read up on Dutch history too, at least in that connection.

I just can't believe I've just read The Discovery of Heaven. Haven't I been going on about it enough? I just didn't think this was going to be the next book. For a while I had given up on novels. No mental energy for them. For almost 8 months all I could read and love were what I think of more as Tales than Novels - Nooteboom, Fuller (who calls his book "A Tale") short and sharp and cleverly crafted and smart. And I didn't want those gloatingly a-hah books either. I read a book called Wittgenstein's Mistress on the plane from London in December - it was a jolly good thing that I was reading on the plane and that I'd rather have anything to read than not read anything. If I had been on the ground I would have chucked it after a while, which would have been a mistake, because after I got past the first 100 or so pages I decided I liked it (or it might have grown on me by then). The idea of the book is simply amazing. And it was smart. But it was all I can not to smack the woman. And on top of it all, darn it, when I open a book, I want good prose. People who write with clarity and grace and who take care of their language. And I didn't want endlessly self-reflexive and self-indulgent books. I want storytelling. Not action, you understand. I want plot. The first week that I was back I read Richard Powers' Galatea 2.2. (sneaky title. sounds so sciency I forgot completely about Pygmalion until halfway through the book) Not a whole lot "happens" in Galatea 2.2., but somehow you keep on moving. The book was a gift from my faculty mentor. He's a Victorianist who had spent a year at one of these giant research centres like the one in the book, and as I read I liked imagining him in one of these places. I know why he gave me this book though. It was for the Dutch connection. Powers is his favourite novelist, and it seems the Dutch are, as the acerbic Philip Lentz in the book points out, in attendance in every one of Powers's books. I had given him Cees Nooteboom earlier, and we talked about Dutch writers, and fictional interest in the Netherlands. He wonders why we are not more interested in the Dutch. Not unlike the British, in some ways: sea power, ruled the world for 2 decades...so a good Victorianist should know about them. It's the first time I've read Powers, and I like him very much. I read the book in one day, starting in the morning and refusing to stop, till I finished it at 4 in the next morning. Come to think of it, some of it made me think of Crichton's Terminal Man, if only slightly. By the way is errancy a word? If it is it shouldn't be. It's horrible. What's wrong with errantry? as in Knight-? I think I might try his Gold Bug Variations next. I shall stick it on my "this lifetime" list. Richard Powers writes exceedingly well, and it's such a clever premise that promised so much, the book was compelling and funny and I want my friends to read it. But it didn't go deep enough. I thought it would scare the hell out of me, but it didn't even bother to say boo. I wanted it to storm me violently with new ideas, no, I was worried that with a premise like that, it might force me to rethink my whole attitude towards literature, and I was afraid to, but all it did was to give me a few polite prods with a ten-foot pole and then sidled away. It was good, for a time, but ultimately I was disappointed.

Turned to essays for a while from then, but I wanted the story ("the divine art is the story"), and I can teach myself better with a story. Then tried Fellowship of the Rings, which was absorbing in its own way, but still not what I was looking for. I decided to switch languages and looked on my mother's bookshelf and decided on 1) Chinese translation of If On a Winter's Night 2) Gao Xingjian's Ling Shan (Soul Mountain), but in the end I left them lying on my bed without reading them. Before that Chinese translations of the Petit Nicolas books kept me laughing for one afternoon, but Petit Nicolas doesn't keep you up till 3am. Went to the library and took out Anne Michael's Fugitive Pieces, and she's just as Yen (who recommended the book) described: "a grown-up Winterson"; after the first 5 or 6 pages this is quite clear - she can write beautiful and lucid prose and is very Wintersonesque but I don't quite think I have the patience for that sort of thing anymore, too much outpouring, not cerebral enough. For that matter I don't think I'll read another Winterson again, not a new one at any rate, after the disappointment of "The Powerbook", although at a later date I will most certainly read Fugitive Pieces. I took out, at the same time, Tom Stoppard's The Invention of Love, which really makes me think that all books have their time, that 2 years ago I couldn't have appreciated this much, but now that I've had some Latin and Greek (and Catullus!) I feel much more ready for it - but I gave it up after a while: Stoppard's too quick and urbane, and I wanted something slower and graver. But I did not know or think this giant book would be what I was looking for. It looked all wrong too, at 700 pages, too heavy to carry around to read on the train. And yet it was everything I wanted. The prose was excellent, the story was fascinating, and so sexily cerebral too, I can't believe how much this guy knows, but all that is only in the service of the story, not for its own sake. And Max and Onno! Do men like them exist? I cried for never having met them. I have to go read The Procedure now. I must rephrase that. Not "I'm compelled to read his other books now" but "this moment I'm going offline and into bed to read it NOW" yes. I go.