Here’s a book review that makes me want to go out and buy the book immediately (or, this being the Internet age, go to Amazon and click). The book in question is Ian Buruma’s Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance.
The book gets a glowing review. Interesting that Buruma is another observer who sees characters such as Bouyeri (van Gogh’s murderer) as self-loathing losers. As the reviewer (Claire Berlinski) writes:
Buruma finds him virtually the embodiment of the archetype described by the German writer Hans Magnus Enzensberger as "the radical loser": young, talentless, self-pitying; a man whose loathing of himself could be converted with only scant coaxing into a violent loathing of others. (This character was also foreshadowed, of course, over and over again, in Dostoevsky’s Notes from the Underground.) Bouyeri was pudgy. He was no good at sports. Dutch women snubbed him. His parents, bewildered immigrants from a remote village in the Moroccan Rif mountains, appeared to him whipped, subservient, humiliated.
The review itself is worth reading – it looks as if Buruma has captured aspects of multicultural Dutch society and pinned them like butterflies onto his specimen board for us to gaze at and ponder on. They are not always a pleasant sight. And Buruma apparently offers no solutions. But understanding what we are dealing with is the first step in the right direction.
Geoff Coupe's Blog 
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