So many!

A handful of the films I've seen this year so far
War
Defiance
Valkyrie
The reader
The lives of others

Vampire
Let the right one in
Twilight

British classics
Brideshead revisited (BBC series)
Brideshead revisited

Foreign arthouse
I have loved you for so long
Departures

Quirky comedies
Everything is illuminated
Ghost town

Silly / light comedies
Bride wars
Lawrence Leung's Choose your own adventure

A few of the books I've stuck my nose into this year
The lot, Michael Leunig
Peace of Mind, Ian Gawler
A fraction of the whole, Steve Toltz
The art of happiness, His Holiness the Dalai Lama
The art of happiness at work, His Holiness the Dalai Lama
How to see yourself as you really are, His Holiness the Dalai Lama
The joys and sorrows of work, Alain de Botton
Status Anxiety, Alain de Botton
The wealth within, Ainslie Mears
The road less travelled, Scott M Peck
What I talk about when I talk about running, Haruki Murakami
The canon: the beautiful basics of science, Natalie Angier
The power of now, Eckhart Tolle
Choosing happiness, Stephanie Dowrick
The great longing, Marcel Moring
The Jane Austen bookclub, Karen Joy Fowler
The tibetan book of living and dying, Sogyal Rinpoche
Jane Eyre, Charlotte Bronte
Bleak house, Charles Dickens
Various travel guides for Western and Eastern Europe

Re-reading
Europe, Jan Morris
The great fire, Shirley Hazzard
Getting things done, David Allen

Mass murderer's momma with mass appeal

I'd never before read anything by Lionel Shriver. The subject matter of her literary achievement (winner of the Orange Prize) would never had tempted me were it not for its recommendation by two women whose writing taste I admire greatly - Anke and Lauren. (Now, thanks to our wedding and various accommodation logistics, the pair are now both fast friends as they are more literarily compatible with each other than either are with me!)

It's the story of ... yeah, how do I put it, the frequent missives of the mother of a teen mass murderer to her estranged husband, and it raises questions whether the environment and upbringing influences a child's behaviours or whether a child can be born innately evil.

It is dense writing, very highly tuned. As it's a collection of letters, written by a clearly well-educated woman in her 50's, it's believable. The pithiness of her writing serves as an intricate veil to savour the getting through of, while our unreliable narrator unravels this destructive and violent tale.

At times it became hard to believe that a woman who has had no children of her own would dare to write something so controversial. Difficult to accept that this woman did not interview any real-life 'Columbine' parents. But the neat and painful end is viewed through a lense of the absolute hatred and (perhaps in this case, even) love that only a parent can know. Oh, Eva is unlikeable and hypocritical, she is blind to her own influences on the little world around her. But we stand by her, hoping for her, but we're not quite sure for what. But we do it. Up to the very last page.

Negative points? Few. Sure, I think the portrayal of Kevin as a toddler through to a young teen is terribly unfair, while extremely creepy and excellent. But I have no children of my own. And Eva is writing these letters as a form of therapy to find that elusive closure one would search for after such a happening, so she summons the darkest of memories to put her point forward. I find something amiss in the fact that Eva talks so frequently about Thursday and the bald fact that her son is a killer ... but then I've not interviewed any real-life 'Columbine' parents. And of course, as the novel centres around the 2 year anniversary of this nightmare and Kevin is soon to turn 18, of course she's focussing on the facts. These are barely flaws I point out, though, and hell, we all know unlike Shriver, I'm no writer.

What I admire is the attention to detail, but above all, her fierce imagination. How she never told me, but always showed me! How I let myself be taken along the flow of beautiful prose to the point that I didn't stop to work out the twist. But how delighted (but also dismayed) I was to have the denouement unveiled before me in black-and-white. She so clearly illustrated the daily trials (in more ways than one) of motherhood, and the worst of all bad dreams - to discover that your child is capable of murder.

Do yourself a favour, and read this book. Not only will it force you to consider to what extent society has come to see violence as being part of the American teenage condition, but it talks about notions of family and its frequent failure to enable its members to really connect. Can children be born rotten to the core? Shriver will have us believe it, but only for a moment.

Un. Put. Downable.

My first Dutch novel

Yesterday at about 2pm, I finished my very first Dutch language novel, De Vliegeraar, by Khaled Hosseini. All 350 pages of it.

There's not a lot I can really say about its being a literary masterpiece, because half the time I was just happy to know what was going on.

But this time, that was the object.

What I feel most triumphant about is that it's the first book in ages that I've cried during reading ... and not once, not twice, but three times. For me, that means I was looking beyond the frustration of not really understanding every third word, but that I was being involved.

De Vliegeraar is set in Afghanistan and the US, told by the guilt-riddled narrator, Amir, who neatly unravels the tale of how he reaches salvation after 20 years of self-hatred and cowardice.

I may well re-read it in English to see whether I should have enjoyed (is that the right word?) it so much ... or maybe I'll just wait five years and re-read it in Dutch to capture the nuances I lost this time around.

A real accomplishment for me, she who never read such a long book in Italian or French! (And who now probably couldn't, if she tried!)

Warm coincidence

It's only taken me 7 months to get to a tango event, but I've finally done it.

Edwin good-naturedly let me to drag him along to the bi-monthly Tipo Tango Sunday night salon, which is held in an old seminary for the Augustine priests, near the Dommel canal.

After an hour of watching and looking at prospective dance partners expectantly (and outright ignoring my life-partner, Ed), I admitted defeat and started to gather my things. However, the perceptive gastvrouw saw us getting ready to go and had noticed neither of us had danced during the short evening.

Before too long, we three got to chatting and she told us that her husband, the gastheer, had been born in Australia and that they had a son who had spent a number of years working and travelling in Australia. Subsequently she sent for her husband to spin me (albeit rustily) around the dance floor for a three-dance combo of milonga, vals and tango. The floor was a bit slippery (or perhaps it was me), but the lovely couple continued to speak to me after my dance, in very clear and slow Dutch. So nice of them. Of course, we left with a flyer and repeated invitations to take workshops and lessons with them, but that's their business and what they were there for.

As hosts, they succeeded in making me feel at home, and it was quite a fluke that we all had so much (sort of) in common.

Oh, and their son had met a lovely Australian girl during his travels.

Her name was Jane.

It really does take two to tango

That's why I'm at home right now, instead of at Salon Tango Tarro in Gonnie's Theatre of Taste, in Eindhoven. (See http://www.tangotarro.nl/ for more). But going solo is a pretty wussy excuse.

So, next week I'm going to try to get to the Tipo Tango Salon, also in Eindhoven, next Sunday. (See http://www.tipotango.nl/). And I will go alone, as Edwin's tango is non-existent at this point.

Finally, when I get my chops back, I will go to Nijmegen's legendary Chained Salon (see http://www.elcorte.com/dance/chainedsalon.htm) where it's basically an all evening and then all night marathon. You get to sleep over, which is cool. People from all over Europe, no, all over the world make their pilgrimage here. I am really looking forward to my first milonga, and will tell you all about it. When it happens.

Watch this space.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter

It's rare that you come across a novel that possesses the almost perfect knit of prose, character development, and plot. Wait a minute, I think they call that 'literature' in the bookstores.

The Memory Keeper's Daughter by Kim Edwards is, incredibly, a first novel. Edwards is an assistant professor of English at the Unviersity of Kentucky, (i.e in my eyes therefore, highly qualified to write such beautiful sentences -unlike myself). Her descriptive talents rarely result in clichés, she writes with a fluidity and an originality that seems to have taken years and years. (I don't know for sure how long this book was in the making, though). I do know that Edwards is an acclaimed a short-story writer, which might explain the condensing of the story into time periods. She skips fom 1964 to 1989, using key periods such as the Vietnam War, Disability Rights, Women's Lib as backdrops. It comforts me to be reminded that the older you are, the more you know, or have experienced or have observed; the more you have to say.

So The Memory Keeper's Daughter is not perfect. There are some strange parts to the storyline, which raised questions such as, 'what happened to Rosemary and Jack?', and 'Oh, I think I'm supposed to be crying bcause this is probably the most poignant part of the story', 'Someone, please leave me a deed, and a secret bank account with lots of money in it - ah, the convenient fantasy-factor of novels' and 'Man, that's some big secret. 25 years? Surely someone would have blurted it out?'. But the satisfying part of Edwards' writing is that the plot in other, less literary hands could have been extreme-ly (imagine an American male voice-over booming as you read extreme) saccharine and blurgghhh. (The Drowning People by the then 19 year old very good looking Brit, Richard Mason, springs to mind. nb 4 days I'll never get back).

Plot summary? In 1964, a young doctor with a sad and impoverished past helps his wife give birth to twins. The first child is a boy, and completely healthy. The second is a girl. With Down Syndrome. The doctor, thinking that such a child will bring sadness to wife and new family, decides to ask the nurse who assisted at the birth to take the girl to an institution. He tells his wife the daughter was still born. But the nurse keeps the child and raises her in another city. The 'death' of the daughter, this lie, affects the lives of each character. Of course, the plain, lonely, single nurse finds love and a personal cause in the rearing of the handicapped child, the doctor's wife turns to drink and a collection of love affairs, the son grows up a musical genius, although bitter (the old 'in the shadow of his 'dead' sister' syndrome), and the doctor tries to overcompensate for his terrible decision thereby ruining the next 25 years for everyone. It sounds melodramatic, but I honestly must say it didn't feel like it.

Oh, it could have been horrible and yes, I read it within a period of 24 hours, which is quite fast for me (the previous book was read within 72 hours, the one before that .... 3 months!). So maybe I have edited out the 'meh' parts. But it was a page-turner, it was gripping. Did I really care about the characters, did I really believe them? Well, actually no, not really.

The writing lured me most.

So, how does Kim Edwards write?Here are some of the many things that made me smile, or think, I want to make someone else smile when they read something I might write:

Laundry that smells of wind. (Wait a minute, what kind of wind? Hmmm)

Specks of blood are grim hearts, bloody valentines.

A vacuum cleaner is incongruous and odd as a steel-blue pig.

The sound of wasps being sucked up said vacuum cleaner is like acorns bouncing on the roof.

"Phoebe was shoving her hands deep into the velvety lentils now, laughing with the little boy beside her. She lifted fistfuls and let them run through her fingers, and the boy held out a yellow plastic cup to catch them."

Okay, I don't really know why I love these descriptions. But I can smell the laundry, see those hearts and the Electrolux. I can hear those wasps go knock-klok-bok up the hose. I can also hear the hiss of the lentils as they trickle onto a pile and I can see random lentils fly off the little mound and bounce off and around. I like what I read to mildly surprise me. Then I become greedy!

But there are other things. There are the moments when Phoebe grabs the medallion, when you find out more about the technical side of the photos that David took, and the simple fact of Paul's musical talents and Julliard dreams. Sure, it's fiction, and anything can happen. But I also realised the extent of the research gone into this work.

Sure, I can be a bit choppy and change-y when it comes to books and movies. I need time to digest them, and I finished consuming this story only 9 hours ago. Sometimes I realise I have actually detested a film for its flaws and simplicity even though I left the cinema on an adrenalin high. And I've read a few books that have started off brilliantly and then left me wanting. Or their writing style redeems their disappointing content, or vice versa. Works such as Zadie Smith's White Teeth and Audrey Niffenegger's The Time-Traveller's Daughter come to mind. Three Dollars, by Elliot Perlman - I loved it on the first reading, I hated it on the second and I gave up on the third. But, a plus for me, I still remember these books and I remember being astonished by what I was reading. The Memory Keeper's Daughter is one of these such creations. Will I read it again? Probably not. Am I glad I read it? Definitely. It has spurred me onto my own literary quest. Because the more I read, the more I want to write. (Note to self: I should listen to even more music).

What's with the rear seating possie?

I've called this blog Back Seat Reviewer, because I don't really think I'm qualified to review arty things. But I like to and can read/see/hear. I suspect that I have some thinking capabilities too. So, these factors combined may suggest that I could convey my opinion on material I've read, seen or heard.

I started posting entries about such seen/heard/read things on my other blog, www.chasingparadise.blogspot.com, but as most of the things I was consuming were in English, it didn't really fit in with the Australian girl's adventures in the Netherlands theme.

So, welcome to my spin-off blog.

Noice.

My next entry will be about the things I've attended, imbibed or absorbed in some way, shape or form, during the month of February. Hopefully it'll be interesting reading. But more importantly for you readers to note, this blog is actually for my personal record-keeping. Therefore, there will be loads of spoilers. I shall warn you, don't worry.

I need to include points as to "what happened at the end" generally speaking, because of the sieve-like properties of my memory. The secret purpose of this blog is to patch up some of those pesky holes.