When Politis to the Point invited Wouter Plomp, Ambassador of the Kingdom of the Netherlands, to share his summer reading list, we expected a selection of Dutch authors or books describing his homeland. What we received instead was a sincere and refreshingly informal note about the books currently on his nightstand, many of them devoted to Cyprus, its people, history and nature. From Lawrence Durrell to Colin Thubron, and with a nod to the island's bookshops and birdlife, his list reads like a heartfelt tribute to his host country. We publish it here as he wrote it.
In his own words:
With pleasure I respond to your request for a summer reading list. And I’m looking forward to reading all the summer recommendations by my colleagues or other Politis readers in the coming weeks. I’m always eager to find new titles that fall outside of my usual scope.
The latest book I started reading is The Switchman (De Wisselwachter) by Dutch historian Geert Mak about relations between the United States and Europe in the 1930’s and ‘40’s through the eyes of Harry Hopkins and the Roosevelts. These people built the social policies of the New Deal after the economic depression and the wartime alliance that won the second world war. I’m not a very avid reader of history books, but Geert Mak is a master of telling the great movements of history through individual lives and the choices men and women had to make. Another book which I enjoyed reading tremendously is last year’s What we can know by Ian McEwan. Although it’s dystopian and disturbing showing us a future in 2119 when much of the world is flooded due to climate change, I found the story highly entertaining and superbly written.
Since I live in Cyprus, most of my reading focuses on all aspects of this island, its people, history and nature. And the Moufflon Bookstore has been a great help, as has Rustem in the north. Of course, I started with Lawrence Durrell’s Bitter lemons, followed by the Island of the missing trees by Elif Shafak. The former resonates with me because there are many sharply observant Dutch authors who served as civil servants in places like the Dutch East Indies or Indonesia and wrote about their observations of daily colonial life and the dilemmas of their work. (And if ever I would buy an old house in Cyprus, and I need to renovate it, I know who to turn to.) The Missing trees is a delightful romantic read against the background of the recent history of Cyprus, though the talking fig tree can be a bit too much. A bit older and also a very romantic story is Betwixt and betweenby Miltiades Hatzopoulos, a Greek author, obviously smitten with Cyprus, who wrote a trilogy about growing up as a Greek Cypriot boy going to the English school in the 1950’s, falling in love and losing his virginity in Famagusta, and after studying in Paris coming back and fighting in Nicosia in 1974. The book which I use most as a travel companion, is Colin Thubron’s Journey into Cyprus. His long hike around the island in the spring of 1974 is a delight to read, e.g. when he describes the mosaics of the Virgin and the Archangels in the church of Kiti. Finally, as a birdwatcher, I eagerly follow the excellent publications of Birdlife Cyprus and I’m also interested in learning more about plants and flowers.
