David Liss was a graduate student in eighteenth-century literary studies when he published his first novel,
A Conspiracy of Paper. Set during the period he studied, the novel combines the historical mystery genre with a fascinating background of the emergence of coffee-house commercial and intellectual culture, along with the social and political situations of Jews in London. I rather liked it, and so did a lot of other people, because it became a best-seller, and he was able to walk away from academia. He's since published at another novel with the same protagonist,
While looking for novels with a setting in Amsterdam, I found
another book by Liss, T
he Coffee Trader. Once again, Liss gives us a fascinating look at the complexities of Jewish life in Europe, following Portuguese conversos, or "Secret Jews", who've fled Lisbon to live in the relative freedom of Amsterdam of the 1600s, a city becoming a hub of international commerce and finance. I enjoyed how Liss incorporated the details of daily life--food, domestic relations, taverns, the geography of the city, the relations between classes, the Dutch and foreigners--into a tale in which duplicity as the rules of business stands in uneasy relationship to the morality of the community.
A great follow-up to this novel is a book I bought in order to revise part of a course I'll be teaching again next Spring: Mark Pendergrast's
Uncommon Grounds:/the History of Coffee and How it Transformed our World.
I have a lot of pictures from the last several months that I haven't labeled or organized. Here are a few from my summer trip to Amsterdam--the street market had a combination of food, clothes, and oddities. I had never seen cabbages this pointy before, and I was highly tempted to get that blue wig in the middle.
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