On Amsterdam – Pablo Scheffer in TLS:

‘To Albert Camus, Amsterdam’s concentric waterways resembled the circles of hell. His protagonist in The Fall (1956), a “judge- penitent” who whiles away his days in a seedy sailors’ bar on the Zeedijk, unkindly describes the city’s “little space of houses and canals, hemmed in by fogs” as an enfer bourgeois.’

(…)

‘Coates writes, for instance, that Amsterdam’s canal houses are narrow because of the cost of drilling into the marshy ground the wooden poles needed to support them. In fact, property tax in seventeenth-century Amsterdam was levied based on the width of a building’s façade. (The city was notorious for its taxes. In 1659, an English diplomat wrote that a man could not “eate a dishe of meate but that one way or another he shall pay 19 excises out of it”.) This resulted in what Coates aptly describes as “Tardis-like” houses that are regularly six times deeper than they are wide. Those few waterside properties that don’t conform to this rule – such as the imposing Trippenhuis, currently home to the Dutch Academy of Sciences, but constructed for the fabulously rich Trip brothers – were built as ostentatious markers of their owners’ wealth.’

(…)

‘The author, who has lived in and around the city for the past decade, clearly knows it intimately and is an effortlessly charming guide. He leavens his account with a rich body of literary and historical sources, from Andrew Marvell to Alain de Botton, and has an excellent eye for the fetching fact. We learn, for instance, that when Camus’s protagonist made his perch on the Zeedijk, a gay bar had been open down the road for more than two decades. By the end of Ben Coates’s enjoyable account, one can’t help feeling that the judge-penitent’s verdict was wrong.’

Read the article here.

The circles of the hell is a bit of an exaggeration, but many taxi drivers I talked to in the past decade or so would happily subscribe to the judge-penitent’s verdict. They moved out of the city, too expensive, and often complain that the mayor, the lefties or the tourists destroyed the city.

But then, complaining that things are not what they used to be is just secretly complaining that you yourself are not what you used to be.

And besides that, probably hell is more fun than heaven, at least for the spectators.