The Words In My Hand

‘'Didn't they know I had used the last of my paper on this work? The new paper I wanted, bought with money I'd never have, blew about my head, tumbling like leaves in a gale. I saw birds, caught in the storm, taken higher and higher, quills blown to the top of the sky.''

In one of my recent reviews, I wrote about debuts and how fortunate we readers are to live in a time that constantly gives us more and more examples of authors whose first forays to the world of Literature are exceptional. This novel by Guinevere Glasfurd is one more token of our wonderful, exciting reading era.

Helena is a young woman, living in the Netherlands, during the 17th century. She is quite different and quite ahead of her time. She craves knowledge and has taught herself to read and write. However, she is forced to travel to Amsterdam to become a maid in order to financially support her mother and finds herself in the enterprise of an English bookseller. One day, the famous René Descartes arrives as a temporary lodger and from that moment on, the book examines the difficult relationship between the Dutch girl and the French philosopher.

Glasfurd weaves the story around the love affair between the main characters, but the novel never becomes a romance, not even close. She has done a wonderful job with the characters and their interactions. In the heroine's portrayal, she has achieved the perfect balance because Helena tries to achieve independence and fulfillment of her thirst for a better life but -faithful to the context of the era- she never manages to escape the various social constraints. It is often that we see female characters in historical novels who aren't realistic and have turned out too modern. Here, this doesn't happen and fortunately so, because her point of view is our sole eyes to the story and her ideas are clearly in the foreground.

Descartes is a man of thought, coming to grips with reality with great difficulty. He is a loner, desperate to communicate his ideas, a man who doubts the established system. His relationship with Helena causes him to challenge his perspective, but there are limits. He has his mission but finds a new kind of fulfillment in Helena's presence. She challenges his world view up to a point and forces him to question all the beliefs he had taken for granted.

When the setting is the beautiful country of the Netherlands, then it becomes a character in itself.Here, our focus isn't just Amsterdam. We travel to Deventer, Leiden, Santpoort and Amersfoort. The descriptions are so vivid that I could picture the cities, I could smell the market odours, I could feel the crisp, wintry air. There is an absolutely stunning text where Descartes describes the snowflakes whose beauty and poetry drove away the heatwave we're currently experiencing in Athens.

The interactions are well-composed, the dialogues a successful mixture of clear language that balances daily speech and period speech. The voices of the characters are fully ‘'heard'', the details of the everyday life of the era create a beautiful background. The writer achieved to bring fact and fiction together in harmony and managed to highlight the issues of a woman's struggle to find her place in a world made by men for men, the search of knowledge, the responsibility and self-sacrifice of being a single parent, the eternal fight between Thought and Action.

I admit I am very fond of novels that are set in the Netherlands, but I can't help it. There is something in that particular setting that provides a distinctive aura to a novel. Glasfurd's book is as beautiful and fluid as the waters of Amstel in the dusk, as the flickering lights on its surface....