Ian Buruma's Murder in Amsterdam

Murder in Amsterdam is a fascinating book that is also maddening in at least two ways. The content and approach are intentionally maddening; the writing style is unintentionally maddening (at least, I hope it's unintentional).

Author Ian Buruma gives fair warning of the intentionally maddening aspects in the book's subtitle—The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance. Provocateur and filmmaker Theo van Gogh (great-grandnephew of Vincent) was publicly and brutally murdered on November 2, 2004, by an angry young Muslim named Mohammed Bouyeri. "Angry young Muslim" is becoming a cliche in the news, and Buruma does nothing to encourage us to think differently, although he does begin to differentiate among various types and nationalities of Muslims. He characterizes assassin Bouyeri as "an increasingly disturbed young man whose conversion to jihadism . . . had begun by rejecting 'Western values" (p. 193). Nothing new there. By the end of the book, if you aren't angry at young Muslims, then you weren't paying attention. Buruma repeatedly hammers home the violence, the intolerance, and the utter rejection of democracy practised by these angry young Muslims. But he also encourages us to be angry at the complacent Dutch people who "allowed" their national situation to degenerate to the point where the murder was possible. He describes a long national history of ambivalent? hypocritical? burghers who associate in "pillars" of "Our Own Kind" while priding themselves on their tolerant culture.

The most fascinating part of the book is the questions that Buruma dares to suggest; questions which our polite, tolerant, multi-cultural society seldom allows us to even think. How far should tolerance extend? Must we (should we?) be tolerant of those who do not wish to tolerate even our existence? Do immigrants have a responsibility to assimilate at least as far as allowing the basic tenets of their society (e.g., democracy and tolerance)? If people who believe and actively (violently) promote theocratic government move to a democratic society, are they immigrants or terrorists? Maddening questions, indeed.

The unintentionally maddening element in this book is the writing style. To me, it reads as though it were a collection of blogs or, perhaps, newspaper columns (Buruma is a journalist.) Fair enough, if it were published as such. But the presentation is that of a novel or at least a coherent "book," and interviews with Buruma give no hint that these are recycled materials. Meanwhile Buruma gleefully leaps about among news articles, expert testimony, his childhood experiences.... Worst of all, he seldom introduces his "characters" clearly, and so we are left to read long passages that we think are about one person (Bouyeri, most often) only to discover that they are about someone else entirely. A good editor, a few transitions, and a little context would have improved the reading experience greatly. And I don't think it would dilute the intentional provocation of anger one bit.