Although I had picked up the author's works throughout the years, it was Eleanor Wachtel's interview with Cees Nooteboom that firmly nudged his Rituals onto my reading list for Iris' DutchLit Fortnight this year. (The interview is available in podcast here.) 1980; HBJ, Translated Adrienne Dixon, 1983 Rituals
It began when I was a girl, with books like Jean Webster's Daddy Long Legs and Norma Fox Mazer's I, Trissy. These stories invited me directly into characters' private thoughts, via letters written to a trusted recipient and journal entries written for the writer's own eyes. Trans. Katharina Bielenberg
It's on the back of Canada's five-dollar bill: the opening lines of Roch Carrier's "The Hockey Sweater". 1979; House of Anansi, 2012 That's how central this story, only four pages long, is to Canadians. A short story about hockey, a 10-year-old French-Canadian boy's crowning disappointment, and the cultural
First, it's small enough to fit in a pocket. The book, not the moose. And there's something charming about that, right? And something seductive about the idea that you can easily sit down with a book and meet its characters and stay with them, in a single sitting,
Finally: a story about animals that won't leave you in a puddle, heart-broken, swearing off all other animal stories for life. (I won't name them here, because including them in this context is truly spoilerific, but you know the stories I'm referring to. We probably cried in all the same
