7. Bury Me Standing: The Gypsies and Their Journey, Isabel Fonseca
This book is fascinating and heart-breaking, but I felt ambivalent about it, and not just because of its rambling structure.
Fonseca spent several years researching the life of gypsies in Eastern Europe during the 90s, living in their family homes in some cases. The resulting book is dense and covers a lot of ground: the origins of the Gypsy people and their history in different parts of Europe; their 20th century history (awful - holocaust, pogroms, ethnic cleansing, and small-town stories of homes burned out while the police stand by and watch); Gypsy politics and self-determination; Fonseca's observations on language, culture and customs; and (most interestingly to me) her account of the time she spent living with Roma families.
There's a good review of the book here, which gives a flavour of the things that it does well: archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/97/03/09/bsp/bury.html. It's certainly an interesting and lively book, moving, compassionate, and erudite.
Gypsies have taken up the lambada, the otherwise-defunct Brazilian musical craze. They are obsessed with symbolic cleanliness but don't care about tidiness, knowing that a shabby look keeps strangers away. In Romany, their language, the same verb describes both smoking and drinking and the same adjective means both poor and bad, but there are no words for warmth, quiet, begging or danger. The Semitic word for blacksmith, a traditional Gypsy occupation, is cain, which has long prompted outsiders, or gadje, to suggest that the biblical curse on Abel's brother left Gypsies to wander the world.
There is a similarly illuminating surprise on every page of Isabel Fonseca's "Bury Me Standing," an erudite, beautifully written book about Gypsy life and lore. Ms. Fonseca, who is as impressive for intrepid reporting as for analytical scholarship, has been from the Hotel Glob in Auschwitz (where she finds memorial exhibits that notably overlook the Nazis' persecution of Gypsies) to the bosom of an Albanian gypsy family she describes in intricate detail. She draws upon poets, itinerants, self-promoting Gypsy kings and forward-looking political leaders ("from the Gypsy point of view, it is neither odd nor inconsistent to be both an M.P. and a used-car dealer") to piece together this captivating portrait.
I felt a bit unsure about the project, and about this review as well if I am honest. I'm not Roma, and nor is Isabel Fonseca (Wikipedia tells me that she is American-Uruguayan, and married to Martin Amis - she tells the reader in her book that she is Jewish, and she draws tentative comparisons between the history of the two races as well as the modern atrocities carried out against them). While she's a careful writer, open-minded, non-judgemental, it still doesn't seem quite right to be reading this comprehensive and unique book about the Roma people, written by an outsider. I'd like to hear responses to the book from within the Roma community, though I haven't found much online apart from a critical review on Goodreads.
In the last chapter, about the establishment of Roma politicians, human rights movements and the work of activists, she mentions Ian Hancock, a British Romani scholar and political advocate - I have requested one of Hancock's books from the library and look forward to reading it alongside this one.