Book 156, Switzerland: "Heidi" by Johanna Spyri

I've spent a month in Switzerland before, so I've read some of its literature - Friedrich Durenmatt's The Visit and The Physicists and Max Frisch's Homo Faber, for instance. Yet I hadn't, until now, read the most clichéd work of Swiss literature in existence:

Ah, Heidi. I got an illustrated Kindle version off Project Gutenberg. No idea if it was the best translation, but a lot of modern translations seem to be adaptations for younger readers.

And honestly, I can see why they'd target younger readers. The tale is soppy as all hell - Heidi is just five when she enters the scene, and she's all sweetness and light and innocent virtue, never once selfish or rebellious the way actual children are.

She's an orphan: her dad died in a logging accident and her mum died of grief as a result, and her cousin Deta is dumping her on their cranky old grandfather 'cos she's got herself a decent-paying job as a maid in Frankfurt. Never mind that her grandfather, the Alm-Uncle, is famously cranky and solitary and lives all alone in the cold mountains with only his two goats, and everyone in the village thinks she's committing reckless child neglect by placing her in his hands.

But ah, little Heidi is a miracle-worker! She charms the Alm-Uncle into loving her, and is utterly content with only having goat milk and cheese and bread for food and sleeping on a bale of hay, and spends all her days hanging out with Peter, the 11 year-old goatherd, playing with the goats and marvelling at the beauty of the sunrise and sunset and the flowers and the grass and the pines and the everything that you'd think a little Swiss village girl would just see as part of the landscape.

But then we've got the big conflict: Deta returns and asks her to come to Frankfurt to become a friend to Clara, an 8 year-old invalid daughter of the rich Mr Sesseman. The story thus turns into a narrative contrasting the oppressiveness of the German cityscape with the glory of the Swiss countryside.

You see, Heidi creates a huge ruckus in the household with her innocent country ways - she offers to take in an entire litter of kittens from a guy who guards a clock tower, at one point, and freaks out her governess with the surfeit of meowing kittens overflowing from her pockets. But she wins over Clara and Sebastian the butler and rich Mr Sesseman, because she's so pure of heart.

But Frankfurt's all wrong for her, and she gets skinny and sickly and starts sleepwalking, so Mr Sesseman sends her back to the Alps, and eventually sends Clara as well for a holiday. And Clara's so invigorated by the fresh mountain air and the goats' milk and the flowers that she actually starts walking again. Seriously, now.

So yes, it's a sappy story. But it was a pleasure to read - even knowing the ending, I was amused at the exact manner in which the miracle was executed, and how gradually, and how almost believably it came about. And it's fun to enjoy things ironically. Nonetheless, I've a few questions that bug me:

1) Isn't this all a little exploitative? I mean, we're romanticising the lives of the poor here. And their relationship with the rich is one of utter harmony - the Sessemans fall over their feet in their eagerness to bestow gifts unto Heidi's community, and are thanked for it. It's not a problem that some of our characters go barefoot and some ride around on silk cushions, apparently...

2) The levels of Christianity are too damn high. The only good things Heidi gets out of her stay in Frankfurt are the ability to read, and a new understanding of prayer and the ways of God, with which she's able to convince her bitter old grandfather to start going to church again. Really, the preaching is laid on pretty damn thick - not sure how much they preserve this in today's versions.

3) Is Peter an asshole? I wanted to declare him one as I read the story and watched him get rabidly jealous of anyone who became friends with Heidi, because he wanted to be her bestest and only friend aside from the goats - he has a habit of shaking his little fists at the sky, and even pushes Clara's wheelchair down the mountain at the end (without her in it, mind). So he is an incredible brat compared to our heroine. But then he's human - he's the one who actually acts the way a poor kid should act in the presence of the 19th century über-rich, which is to get mad and get smashing.

And a couple of factoids. First, the sequels to this book - Heidi Grows Up and Heidi's Children - weren't written by Johanna Spyri but by her translator. And second, Heidi isn't even her real name. It's Adelheid, which is an actual Christian name, whereof Heidi is a corruption, confusing the proper folks in Frankfurt no end.

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Representative quote: 
"Grandmama told me that God would make everything much better than I could ever dream. I shall always pray from now on, the way grandmama taught me. When God does not give me something I pray for, I shall always remember how everything worked out for the best this time. W'll pray every day, grandfather, won't we, for otherwise God might forget us."

"And if somebody should forget to do it?" murmured the old man.

"Oh, he'll get on badly, for God will forget him , too. If he is unhappy and wretched, people don't pity him, for they will say: 'he went away from God, and now the Lord, who alone can help him, has no pity on him.'"

Next book: Johann Kraftner's Princely treasures from the House of Liechtenstein, from Liechtenstein.

Book 82, Yemen: "I Am Nujood, Age 10 and Divorced" by Nujood Ali

And thus we begin West Asia, with a little light reading! And before you think I'm being facetious about the terribly serious issue of child marriage, I'll have you know that this book is (quite appropriately, when you think about it) written as if targeted towards children, written by proxy to explain every single aspect of Yemeni everyday life to foreigners aged 10 or above: the recipe for ful, the rituals of Ramadan, the wording of Al-Fatiha.

Of course I'm suspicious of the agenda: first published as Moi Nojoud, 10 ans, divorcée, it rehearses plenty of clichés of protecting oppressed Asian women from evil Asian men, made all the more insidious by the ventriloquising tactics of "co-author" Delphine Minoui, who writes through the voice of the oppressed rather than overtly exposing herself as the outsider. (Yes, yes, I know how easily interviewees' words can be crafted to fit a desired image; I've done it myself as a reporter, frequently.)

But then it manages to elude some of those clichés - it's not white people saving Nujood, it's the nice Muslim judges and the nice women's rights lawyer Shada Nasser, the foreign journalists come in only later, and pretty much all the urbane Yemenis she tells her story to are appalled. Plus, there's an intro and outro in Minoui's voice, delicately explaining the background of the nation and Nujood's later quandaries (she wasn't able to stay in her new aid organisation-funded school because of family troubles; her dad still can't find work, her mum is still depressed beyond functionality, her brothers still blame her for shaming the family).

And hell, Nujood's a heroine. Seriously, how many little girls in her position have the guts to run away from their rape and abuse and name their oppressors in court? Plus, she's inspired other girls to follow suit, and has influenced changes in law. Plus, it seems she's been terribly sweet-spirited all through the process.

You'll have to excuse my earlier skepticism. You see, Singapore's undergone social turmoil because of the Western world's moral panic over child brides: namely the case of Maria Hertogh, the Dutch girl adopted into a Muslim Indonesian family and married to her apparent satisfaction and consent at the age of 13, when she'd had her menses and everything already (which Nujood had not). Hertogh's birth mother found her again and successfully sued to get her back into Christendom, against her will. Age of consent and marriageability is a culturally determined thing, dammit; raising both reduces the chances of abuse but there are loads of other factors causing the abuse in the first place.

Ah, there's a lot to blabber on about this issue. Need to get some sleep.


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Representative quote: Yes, I've made up my mind. When I grow up, I'll be a lawyer, like Shada, to defend other little girls like me. If I can, I'll propose that the legal age for marriage be raised to eighteen. Or twenty. Or even twenty-two! I will have to be strong and tenacious. I must learn not to be afraid of looking men right in the eye when I speak to them. In fact, one of these days I'll have the courage to tell Aba that I don't agree with him when he says that, after all, the Prophet married Aisha when she was only nine years old. Like Shada, I will wear high heels and I will not cover my face. That niqab - you can't breathe under it! BUt first things first: I will have to do my homework well. I must be a good student, so that I can hope to go to college and study law. If I work hard, I'll get there.

Next book: Christiane Bird's The Sultan's Shadow, regarding Oman.

Book 34, British Virgin Islands: “Treasure Island” by Robert Louis Stevenson

Yes, I’m a hypocrite. I made fun of Shelbi for doing Dracula for her Romanian book, and now I, too, am interpreting a country through the Victorian fantasy thereof. What to do? I scoured the library and Kindle catalogues and couldn’t find a single writer who was a British Virgin Islander him/herself.

Stevenson never actually visited the Caribbean, but he based the story off his mariner uncle's tales of Norman Island and Charles Kingsley's memoir, At Last: Christmas in the West Indies. So it kinda counts. And anyway, I’ve never read me this classic. The only film version I’ve seen is Disney’s Treasure Planet (haven’t even seen the Muppet Treasure Island!). And this is ur-text for pirate lore itself: the fount of peglegs, parrots yelling pieces of eight and yohoho and a bottle of rum.

It’s a marvelous distraction, surprisingly better toilet reading than New Malaysian Essays 2 (although maybe it’s the Kindle that makes it so convenient to dip into), and man do I love all that archaic language and elevated, unself-conscious prose - after all, it's narrated by the virtuous yet bad-assedly heroic teenage boy Jim Hawkins, with occasional interjections by the Doctor Livesey, both of whom believe ardently in the virtuous of good Christian faith and the damnededness of rum.

Of course, having watched Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, you do have to give some leeway for the fact that in this book swashbuckling hadn't yet been pushed to its psychedelic, octopus-bearded limits. I mean, all the pirates get spooked out about on Skeleton Island is a single skeleton and the voice of the half-idiotic Ben Gunn (ah, the wild man archetype!). On the other hand, the book presses home the fact that it is by no means easy for Long John Silver to get about as a middle-aged man on a wooden leg - he stumbles on uneven ground and roars at the Captain when he refuses to give him a hand up when they're both sitting on the sand - a touch of realism which isn't quite grit, but which makes bloody sense.

Another thing about Long John Silver. He's perhaps the only really Caribbean character of the lot, given that it's mentioned that his wife is "a woman of colour". (I'd thought this was perhaps an idiom of the time for a scolding wife, a woman of choler, as it were, but later on Jim says "I dare say he met his old Negress, and perhaps still lives in comfort with her and [his parrot] Captain Flint. It is to be hoped so, for his chances of comfort in another world are very small."

There really is very little mention of Caribbean culture in the book, other than the name of the ship (HISPANIOLA) and a stopover in Spanish America, where young Jim is "immediately surrounded by shore boats full of Negroes and Mexican Indians and half-bloods selling fruits and vegetables and offering to dive for bits of money. The sight of so many good-humoured faces (especially the blacks), the taste of the tropical fruits, and above all the lights that began to shine in the town made a most charming contrast to our dark and bloody sojourn on the island." They take on a few hands there, but the ones we meet on the journey are all Englishmen, picked up on the docks themselves.

On the other hand, there is that old ruse of the dangers of the tropics - the pirates' great misstep is camping out in a malarial bog, after all. Bah, not completely inclined to do an entire post-colonial reading of the book. Though it does bear mentioning that this is the same guy who wrote, in A Child's Garden of Verses:

Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanee,
O! Don’t you wish that you were me?

The poem's deliberately ironic. Let's the embrace hipster culture and love it for being so.

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Representative quote: "The score!" he burst out. "Three goes o'rum! Why, shiver me timbers, if I hadn't forgotten my score!"

And falling on a bench, he laughed until the tears ran down his cheeks. I could not help joining, and we laughed together, peal after peal, until the tavern rang again.

"Why, what a precious old sea-calf I am!" he said at last, wiping his cheeks. "You and me should get on well, Hawkins, for I'll take my davy I should be rated ship's boy. But come now, stand by to go about. This won't do. Dooty is dooty, messmates."

Next book: Jean Heyn's The Governor-General's Lady, from the US Virgin Islands.

Book 32, Curaçao: "The Other Side of Blue" by Valerie O. Patterson

Yay for Curaçao, which is as of last month officially a country! (Turns out they actually have a larger population than Aruba.) Again, I'm afraid I couldn't find a work by a native Curaçoan (?), but this book will do just fine.


It's shelved under young people's fiction, which I generally eschew for the purposes of this project. But since I'm considering writing for young people, this is terribly useful: it points out to me that I don't have to write like JK Rowling to make it to the market, because you can even succeed with a first-person, present-tense coming-of-age-and-angst story from the viewpoint of an overweight 14 year-old daughter of a successful artist mother.

Yeah, it's pretty cool. Quite different from everything I've been reading: strangely earnest, coming from the viewpoint of someone so young, communicating the utter discomfort in one's body that so many young girls face. Paired together with the descriptions of the sea-and-sand-swept landscape, yummy Caribbean food and a mystery story about the death of the girl's dad.

What's a little annoying is the way the theme of "blue" keeps on being pushed - from the mother's tubes of ultramarine and Prussian blue paints to the protagonist's name, Cyan, and the name of their villa, Blauwe Huis, to the Curaçao liqueur and the blue taxis and the Casa Azul restaurant and the sea, always the sea.

(But I love the way the mother's so distant, and that competition with the daughter of the mother's fiancé - how one's own mother can turn into a wicked stepmother during remarriage. So 21st century, the erasure of traditional birth relationships.)


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I can't quite write something like this, though: it's too dependent on an understanding of the vulnerability and complexity of being a girl. Us guys are a little more thick-skulled. (Ooh, and those are the ABC islands up above - Aruba, Curaçao and Bonaire. We won't be stopping in Bonaire, even though it's the only one of the three anyone I know has visited: namely my sister, last year.)

Representative quote: From the studio windows, I notice the sea is the color of tumbled blue-green glass, roiled and unsettled. Last June after Dad died, his seat between Mother and me on the plane going home sat empty until just before takeoff, when a red-faced, sweating tourist weaved her way down the aisle and claimed it. She stuffed an oversized tote bag under the seat in front of her, leaving me to huddle against the window. As our plane rose into the sky, I couldn't take my eyes off the sea. I thought the color of the water might change with the light, but it didn't. It appeared deep blue, almost black, and dense as oil. No light penetrated the surface; we were left with the dark skin of the sea and no answers.

Next book: Luis Rafael Sanchez's Macho Camacho's Beat, from Puerto Rico.