Set against the backdrop of the Dutch East Indies and Nazi-occupied Holland, this luminous novel delivers epic themes filtered through the rich imagination of a young girl. Living with her parents on the island of Java in the late 1930s, five-year-old Lulu moves in a magical world of daydreams and island myths. But when one day Lulu innocently describes a scene she stumbled across late one night, the repercussions are felt for many years and across two continents. Called from the sumptuous tropics back to The Hague, with stops in Marseilles, Paris, and London along the way, Lulu's family is...
Set against the backdrop of the Dutch East Indies and Nazi-occupied Holland, this luminous novel delivers epic themes filtered through the rich imagin...
What is memory? Without memory we lose our sense of identity, reasoning, even our ability to perform simple physical tasks. Yet it is elusive and difficult to define, and throughout the ages philosophers and psychologists have used metaphors as a way of understanding it. This fascinating book takes the reader on a guided tour of these metaphors of memory from ancient times to the present day, exploring the way metaphors often derived from the techniques and instruments developed to store information such as wax tablets, books, photography, computers and even the hologram.
What is memory? Without memory we lose our sense of identity, reasoning, even our ability to perform simple physical tasks. Yet it is elusive and diff...
This, the author writes, is "the novel of the indiviual in a world of barbarians." It is the story of Ondine and Oscarke, a young married couple adrift in a Belgian landscape that is darkening under the spread of industry and World War I. Ondine, who "came to serve god and live," finds that she must "serve the gentlemen" instead. Oscarke, an aspiring sculptor, finds himself unsuccessfully scouring Brussels for work and, when he is finally hired, too tired to make his own art. They grow old and their four children grow up as "technology and mechanization, unemployment, fascism, and war"...
This, the author writes, is "the novel of the indiviual in a world of barbarians." It is the story of Ondine and Oscarke, a young married couple ad...
Paul Vincent presents a compelling collection of prose fiction, memoirs, and anecdotes centering on Amsterdam from the seventeenth century to the twenty-first century, which gives unique insight into the history and culture of the city. The tales within range from Rembrandt to the Jewish persecution in World War 2, from barricades in a working-class district during the Depression to a writer's unhealthy obsession with a massage parlour. These eighteen newly translated works give the reader, and the traveller, a tantalising glimpse of the Amsterdam that lies beyond the tourist guidebooks.
Paul Vincent presents a compelling collection of prose fiction, memoirs, and anecdotes centering on Amsterdam from the seventeenth century to the twen...