It is a sunny, warm morning in Amsterdam. I took my dog out and we are heading to the Sarphatipark.
It is very calm here. Almost no people around. I sit on a bench in my favorite part of this beautiful park. I admire the view. The impatient person I am, it truly calms me down. I am alone with my thoughts. I turn around and see a sign on the bench. I remember that I have seen this plaque before, but I could not translate it. This time I can. I smile to myself. The small victories in life, when efforts pay off. The quote touches my heart in a strange way. I wonder where it is from.
I think I must go, I do not know where to, but I have to go away,” says Claire. Have you ever had that? That you knew you had to go, but did not know where.”
When I came back home, I found out on the internet that this quote is part of a book called “Het Wonderbaarlijke leven van Claire C” (The miraculous life of Claire C) by Sarah Vanhee.
And here is the story as described in the book reviews:
‘I lost it, I’m lost, I lost it, I’m lost, I lost it, I’m lost’. Some years ago, Sarah Vanhee found an unfinished manuscript by Guillaume Maguire in which the main character is the insecure, unheroic, somewhat lost Claire C. Fascinated by this character, she decided that her story should not be lost. In The C-Project, Sarah Vanhee finished Maguire’s novel by becoming Claire and going in search of the other characters from the book in Amsterdam. This enabled her to find the missing part of Claire’s identity, along with the rest of the story.
Through various channels, she came into contact with people who considered themselves potential characters in a novel. The book was then written on the basis of their meetings with Claire. Where fiction and reality meet is where the imagination is unlocked. Are the people Claire meets ‘real’ or ‘fictional’? Do they belong to the real world, or to the world of stories? And what about the accidental passers-by? Are they the unnoticed audience for a minimal performance, or do they belong to a greater fiction: have they been written themselves?
As the author herself writes, the different benches where the real meetings took place, now all have a plaque with a quote from a chapter that got created there. Via a Q&R code, you can read the whole chapter- so while travelling from bench to bench, one can follow the same road of Claire C in her miraculous life in Amsterdam- turning urban life into a ready-made fiction. By turns both hilarious and harrowing, Claire’s identity unfolds in multiple layers within a dynamic network of voices. The city plan becomes a web of stories; public spaces set the scene for a novel that writes itself.”
Just by sitting on this bench you start to feel yourself as a real character in a fictional story, a silent witness of an intimate conversation of the past.
“Je wist dat je weg moest, maar niet waarheen”
why I want to learn Dutch so quickly is to be able to read in Dutch. Today I bought my first fictional book in Dutch – don’t be surprised it is a child’s book. They are easier to understand and smaller:) I will be reading from it with the help of a dictionary and will make sure to share with you if I come across some interesting words.
Life in the Netherlands is quite great by itself (canals, thousands of cafes, museums,bicycles and what not), but what makes it better is cheese (kaas). What makes it even better is that cheese goes incredibly well with a bottle of white wine. But about this in some other post…
Citywordhunt Dutch 