Ik ben er voor niemand – Ingmar Heytze

Let me start by saying this is one of my favorite books. To my knowledge it has not been translated into English, but I wanted to do it for I found a bookmark anyway, because I love it so.

Ik ben er voor niemand (I’m here for nobody/I don’t exist for anybody) tells the story of a guy called Return to Sender. He talks about his life and the strange creatures who are a part of it, most notably a girl he names Egel (Hedgehog). Their relationship, though now over, informs a lot of his life. Other important characters are the unicorn, who sends him letters because they always seem to just miss meeting each other, the gnome who makes others feel little so that he can feel a bit taller himself and a fox who talks mostly about how to devour small animals like hedgehogs. Ik ben er voor niemand has very loose story structure. Heytze is a poet (I also really love his poetry) who tells this story in little self contained snippets of text. All of which are easily quoted on their own as having something interesting or funny to say. Together they tell a larger story that reveals itself to the reader as you get further along in the book. It is not a large tome, but it feels good to let the individual pieces of prose linger in your mind a bit before going to the next one.

The bookmark I made refers to one of the little stories about the gnome, who I always find hilarious. In it the gnome gets stuck in the roots of a large oak tree. It is made entirely with water colour pencils, and I’m really happy about the colours.

If you can read Dutch I highly recommend reading Ik ben er voor niemand.

The Book Thief – Markus Zusak

Warning: This book leads to heavy emotions. The Book Thief is such an amazing read. It’s pretty unconventional, the narrator is Death, and he doesn’t really uphold a spoiler-policy. He flat out tells you that one character is going to die during this story, quite a while before it actually happens. Death is a surprisingly sympathetic narrator. He has a job and it weighs on him. The Book Thief takes place during WWII, so he has a lot of souls to collect. He watches colours to distract himself from the suffering. (At one point I was reading a particular heavy section of Death talking about collecting a lot of souls, and my music shuffled to the Graffiti6 song Colours. I’ll never hear that song again without thinking about the narrator of this book.)
But the references to Deaths work are only there to give a greater context to the very human story he tells. The Book Thief is about Liesl. A young girl growing up in Germany during the war.

Liesl and her friends and family become incredibly real during the book. It is so well written that you can’t help but feel these people are humans who just try to live their lives. Even though in some cases you know what’s coming (even if you don’t know how it’ll happen) you can’t help getting attached to them. Or at least I couldn’t. Even when I know everything already because I’ve read it before, I still go through all the emotions alongside Liesl. The happiness and the sorrow. As a book-lover seeing the meaning books and the words in them take on in her life is really satisfying. This is a girl who gets it. Even before she can read, she gets the importance of books. I’m not entirely happy with my bookmark on this one. But I guess a part of that is because I love this book so much. No matter how good my work is, it will never do justice to The Book Thief in my eyes. When I try to get away from that, I feel better about the bookmark I made.

I’m reluctant to tell more about the happenings in the book. You should just go read it. Do it. NOW.

This copy of the book hasn’t been in the library for very long, but it’s been read a lot. I think people will read it until it falls apart (it’s already a bit damaged) and the library will have to get a new copy. I’m glad it’s such a popular book. It deserves to be read by everybody in the whole world.
At two points in the book someone left a piece of paper, just a page ripped out of a day planner and a receipt from the library. I left them in where I found them, it felt a bit like running into the other readers. I hope the next reader will like the addition of the bookmark I made.

Jane Eyre – Charlotte Brontë

I’m having some trouble articulating my feelings about Jane Eyre. I started out really loving the book, it really challenged my English reading comprehension and had some very lovely observations in it. I loved Jane’s character and how it developed and became quite fascinated by the goings on at Thornfield. I sometimes wished Jane would be a little more inquisitive about the strange things that were happening, but I understood her to be very trusting of Mr. Rochester due to her love for him.
Jane’s acceptance of Rochesters forceful ways are sometimes a little much for my tastes, I would have liked her to challenge him a bit more to even the score. But I quite enjoyed the resolution of the mystery of Thornfield. I was surprised by all the stuff that happens after that. I could see how much book I still had left to read, but I could not have predicted the curve the story took. At first I was quite fascinated by this whole new part of the story, and I felt that Jane finding a place at the village school would have been a good ending to the book. It would subvert the expectation that at some point the obstacle keeping her and Rochester apart would be solved and they could finally be together. (I am quite amused that the problem would never have been a problem in today’s society, it shows how different the world is now.)

I was a little disappointed with where the story went next. Not that Jane didn’t deserve to be happy, but that she just happens upon long lost relations didn’t feel realistic to me. And the religious context of the discussions Jane and St. John have about becoming a missionary did not give me a good feeling. I had a little trouble divorcing from my regular attitude about such things and to put it in the context of the times the book was written. The long speeches were also a little difficult for me. Maybe I’ll understand it better on a re-read. When Jane finally returns to Thornfield Hall to see how it’s fared, I got excited again. But all that has happened really is that the story wraps itself in a nice little bow to give our heroine her happy ever after. While I was very proud of Jane for sticking to her principles and leaving Thornfield in the first place, at that time I was so very curious to stay with the people staying behind and learn how they’re impacted by the leaving of Jane and the happenings that led to her doing so. As a reader I felt constricted by the first-person narrative right then. That’s the first time that has ever happened to me. Usually I really love the first-person view.

I think the secret of Thornfield Hall and what it ended up being was my favourite part of the book.

The bookmark is mostly Acrylic (I sketched with a pencil, then put a layer of colour pencil on it, then painted over that with acrilyc paint and finally put some acrylic varnish on it.) Those who’ve read the book will (hopefully) recognize the portrait. :)