Jan Snijders Knihy

A good historian, it has been said, is a prophet in reverse. The perceptive historian has the ability to look back at the past, identify issues overlooked by others, all the while stimulating the reader to search for the implications in the present of what has been discovered. Jan Snijders is such a prophet in reverse. He brings his shrewd intuitions and scholarly reflections to the material of this book as no previous writer on Colins leadership in 18351841 has so far been able to achieve.This is a landmark book for historians, but more than that as well. It is the first in-depth scholarly publication on Father Jean-Claude Colin as the French founder of the Marist Missions in the South Pacific. It is an enthralling read for anyone who wonders how French countrymen coped when trying to open a Catholic mission in the New Zealand and in the Polynesian Islands of the 1830s and 1840s. And anyone interested in cross-cultural processes will get a very close look at the culture contacts between French Catholics, Polynesian people and British settlers, all pursuing their own objectives.

Brevity is the soul of beauty in these tiny masterworks of short short fiction Gorgeously translated by Lydia Davis, the miniature stories of A. L. Snijders might concern a lost shoe, a visit with a bat, fears of travel, a dream of a man who has lost a glass uniting them is their concision and their vivacity. Lydia Davis in her introduction delves into her fascination with the pleasures and challenges of translating from a language relatively new to her. She also extols Snijders’s “straightforward approach to storytelling, his modesty and his thoughtfulness.”      Selected from many hundreds in the original Dutch, the stories gathered here―humorous, or bizarre, or comfortingly homely―are something like daybook entries, novels-in-brief, philosophical meditations, or events recreated from life, but―inhabiting the borderland between fiction and reality―might best be described as autobiographical mini-fables.This morning at 11:30, in the full sun, I go up into the hayloft where I haven’t been for years. I climb over boxes and shelving, and open the door. A frightened owl flies straight at me, dead quiet, as quiet as a shadow can fly, I look into his eyes―he’s a large owl, it’s not strange that I’m frightened too, we frighten each other. I myself thought that owls never move in the daytime. What the owl thinks about me, I don’t know.