De Kleine Eva uit de Kromme Bijlstraat – Louis Paul Boon

De Kleine Eva uit de Kromme Bijlstraat is long poem about a young girl that’s found murdered. Louis Paul Boon based it on a real murder and even used pieces of real newspaper articles in the poem, interjected with his own sentences. The entire poem gives a sense of cynicism in regard to how the police and press deal with the murder, how a narrative is is discovered which leaves no room for the actual little girl as a person.

What I thought the poem did well was create a sense of disconnect with the story, this girl was murdered and people are going through the motions, but nobody seems to really care about Eva herself. She just has to play the role of murdered little girl, she’s always described as ‘little Eva’. She fits a certain slot in peoples minds and it’s easy for them to keep her there.

Boon describes the different accounts of people who live in the same area as Eva, of which some lead to suspects. He plays around with spelling, like the suspect who’s literally called Vogel (bird, in Dutch you can call a person a weird bird), a last name usually spelled Vooghel which differentiates it from the word vogel.

De Kleine Eva uit de Kromme Bijlstraat has words and a way of building sentences which were difficult for me, some of that will be that it is an older kind of Dutch than what I’m used to, some of it will be that Louis Paul Boon was Flemish (some words differ), and some of it will be Boon experimenting with language.

The eventual suspect turns out to be a slow witted neighbour who can’t actually be convicted of the murder because there is no evidence, but gets put away on a different charge. Boon shows how uncaring people actually are when that is the end of it. The guy they think did it (because it’s easier to think that than to accept they don’t know who did) gets put away for something and people fine with that. Nobody is ever convicted of the murder.

For the bookmark it took me a while to decide what I wanted to depict. there is so much imagery in the poem that it was a little difficult for me to choose one thing to focus on. In the end I incorporated a few things into the drawing to refer to different things in the poem.

The Lies of Locke Lamora – Scott Lynch

It took me a while to get into The Lies of Locke Lamora because it has a slow build up with lots of exposition. It was never annoying though and the further I got in the book the harder it was to put down. The Lies of Locke Lamora is an excellent book and I can highly recommend it to anyone who likes Fantasy as a genre, interesting characters and good solid world building.

The fictional city of Camorr, where the titular Locke Lamora lives and steals things, is almost a character in it’s own right in that is is so richly described and full off nooks and cranny’s yet to be discovered. I enjoyed Locke’s character quite a lot, although like the book itself it was one that had to grow on me while reading. (I often like roguish characters instantly, so this was different from the norm for me.) I also really felt connected to Locke’s friend Jean Tannen. There are so many different and interesting people in this book, and I feel like each and everyone of them could be the main character of a next book. For the bookmark I have chosen some symbols that refer to some of these characters, and all together they could stand for Camorr as a whole. I hope that those of you who’ve read The Lies of Locke Lamora will see what I tried to get across in this bookmark. Because I can’t get my scanner to work with my new computer, it took me a while to find a workable alternative. The scanner at my job does some weird auto contrast thing that doesn’t really look good for soft pencil work like with this bookmark, so in the end I just took a lot of photos with my camera trying to get the best angle. It’s not ideal, but it works.

The Great Gatsby – F. Scott Fitzgerald

I really enjoyed reading The Great Gatsby, something I was worried wouldn’t happen when I started. I know it’s a famous classic, but that does not mean it is an accessible read, especially to a non-native speaker like me. But I got used to the style quite quickly! The most surprising thing to me was how much I related to the narrator, I really liked him and trusted his point of view.

When it comes to The Great Gatsby a lot has already been written and symbols have been dissected. The library copy I read included a very long introduction which analyses the book. I had started reading it, but decided to stop because I want to read a book and not be stuck in pre-conceived notions about what is important, but rather let things jump out at me and afterwards see if they were the same things.

I had expected there to be a lot more references to the green dock light, because I had seen a vlogbrothers video in which John Green talks about the Great Gatsby and mentions it a lot. But when I was actually reading the book, I got much more attached to Gatsbys car. That is why I drew it on the bookmark, and made it be the only thing that has colour to contrast it with Gatsbys house, which does not actually feel like a house but is just a backdrop.

I had a lot of trouble with this bookmark, I’m not a car-person, so drawing one was not easy for me. I had come up with several sketches that I didn’t like, car- or house-wise. But in the end I found a couple of reference photos of 20’s cars online that gave me an idea of what should go where as far as the car was concerned. I hope you like the result.

The scan of the bookmark looks different than the other bookmarks, because I can’t get my scanner to work on my new computer, so I scanned it at work. The bookmark is winsor & newton ink with a bit of watercolour.