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The Netherlands - by Matt Steinglass
For a country that was once the global capital of the publishing industry, it's extraordinary how little the Netherlands has influenced world literature. Most of the canonical writers of Dutch fiction are unknown outside Holland; many are untranslated. From a traveler's point of view, this is wonderful. Nothing could be more tedious than arriving in a new country with a suitcase full of preconceptions about its culture, drawn from world-famous novels already reduced to cliché by generations of English-language critics. That said, some of the books any visitor to the Netherlands ought to read are familiar enough to the English-speaking world. Chronologically, one would have to begin with "In Praise of Folly," by the humanist clergyman Erasmus of Rotterdam (1466?-1539). The book is a tongue-in-cheek twist on the classical genre of the encomium, in this case delivered by Erasmus' invented muse Folly ("Moriae"), in praise of herself.
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