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A review by andrewspink
Dagboek van een landjonker by Benno Barnard
reflective
slow-paced
2.0
I was glad to get to the end of this book, it was a struggle. For a start, it is riddled with factual inaccuracies. Two within the first 20 pages (the EU doesn't spend 1% of its budget on culture, the Netherlands is by no means the only country that updates old children's books to modern language), then he thinks that the 19th century political party, the Whigs, was something to do with wigs (it means cattle drovers), Erasmus Darwin was not the first person by any means to describe photosynthesis - and so on throughout the book.
Parts of it are quite pretentiously written ("het wezen dat ik met 'ik aanduid" (the being that I refer to as "I"). I am not sure if those passages are meant to be ironic, but it is irritating. Worse, than that parts are quite offensive. He uses the term 'Paki', which is deeply offensive, equivalent to 'the N word' and he is quite consistently misogynistic throughout. He has ultraconservative attitudes on a whole range of matters. Perhaps he is exaggerating for comic effect, but it just irritated me.
I read this book because the friend who leant it to me thought I would like it, seeing Barnard is rather an Anglophile. It turns out he only likes the sort of England to be seen from a cosy Bed and Breakfast. He is unbelievably condescending and insulting about the English working class ("the sort of single mother that would be better off not reproducing") and dismisses the Scots as being incomprehensible (particularly odd for a Dutchman living in Flanders).
In the beginning, I thought I might read his book about England, but after having read this, I don't think I'll bother.
Parts of it are quite pretentiously written ("het wezen dat ik met 'ik aanduid" (the being that I refer to as "I"). I am not sure if those passages are meant to be ironic, but it is irritating. Worse, than that parts are quite offensive. He uses the term 'Paki', which is deeply offensive, equivalent to 'the N word' and he is quite consistently misogynistic throughout. He has ultraconservative attitudes on a whole range of matters. Perhaps he is exaggerating for comic effect, but it just irritated me.
I read this book because the friend who leant it to me thought I would like it, seeing Barnard is rather an Anglophile. It turns out he only likes the sort of England to be seen from a cosy Bed and Breakfast. He is unbelievably condescending and insulting about the English working class ("the sort of single mother that would be better off not reproducing") and dismisses the Scots as being incomprehensible (particularly odd for a Dutchman living in Flanders).
In the beginning, I thought I might read his book about England, but after having read this, I don't think I'll bother.