Now this has become a serious habit -- on good days, I simply check out a few of my favorite fan-fiction sites and skim the updated stories (you know, some of them run for 50 to 60 chapters); on bad days, I go through the forums and read the comments and recommendations until I find something that piques my interest, and will not stop until I'm done with that story. If I don't find anything I like, I search until I do, or get mad, or end up clicking through dozens of sites, which will inevitably leave me frustrated. (Salon is one of them, sorry -- what do you expect, in the current political atmosphere?)

How did I manage to survive so far? My husband does not know of my habit, nor do my kids; although with my elder one, we read the books together and sometimes discuss Harry Potter; I sometimes try to explain some concepts to my child using Harry or Ron as an example -- nothing extraordinary. But once I'm alone at home, I'll start clicking, and I can't stop. Only when I'm out of the house, working where someone else is present, have I been able to do my other work, and that's how I've been able to manage my workload so far.

I've tried to understand my fascination with this; I think partly it's the "magic," a wonderful concept for the imagination. Also I'm a Ron/Hermione shipper (a term that means I'm happy with their relationship), and the stories surrounding the Ron/Hermione dynamics are sometimes so poignant, I tend to fall in love all over with the characters and become so envious of their (imagined) relationship. There are a lot of good stories, mind you, quite a few geared toward the over-19 group, but I'm not really picky about what I read, as long as it's well structured and well written and not OOC (that's Out Of Character). I've never participated in the forums or written fan fiction myself, but I sometimes dream about it -- I feel like I know the writers better than some of my friends.

I've tried cutting off the Internet, not staying home when I'm alone, limiting myself to a certain amount of time, but they haven't worked. Do I need psychological help or therapy? Am I secretly harboring some type of dissent with my current life and expressing it through this destructive pattern of Web surfing? Or am I just procrastinating and not motivated enough to get my arse back to work?

Ardent R/H Shipper

Dear Ardent R/H Shipper,

Is it not starkly emblematic of our barren, frigid Puritanism, hostile to dreamers, that you must hide from your husband, your co-workers and even your children in order to indulge your imagination? Is it you, I'm saying, or is it the world you're living in? Addicted? Full of shame? Shame about what? You say it hasn't killed you yet? No, it's keeping you alive, I dare say. This isn't some heroin full of impurities that is going to jam up your lungs and give you abscesses on your injection spots; this isn't some shameful, basement vodka-drinking, passed-out-mom situation, your blouse fouled with vomit and your limbs askew near the drain at the damp, low spot in the concrete floor. This isn't some manic-depressive speed-freak hell where you find the formerly distinguished chair of language studies at Eminent Ivy Inc. quaking on the bare pine floorboards of an SRO in the Bowery.

This is more the secret reading-and-scribbling indulgence of a Jane Austen or Emily Dickinson, it seems to me, in an age both more crass and more straitlaced than theirs, if such a thing is even possible.

Maybe you are secretly harboring some type of dissent. If so, good for you! Some frowning, malnourished psychiatrist in itchy wool tweed, summoned by the concerned, might drive out in his Buick LeSabre and pronounce you maladjusted. Hallelujah if he does, I'd say. Hallelujah if he does! Let the world diagnose you as seriously maladjusted. To me you stand as a testament to the survival of a fragile innocence in a world that has grown ever more barbaric, and that even now is feeding its young to fascistic engines of domination solely so that future generations, if they survive the heat, can be even more barbaric, domineering and philistine than we are. Yes, if your imagination survives the clitorectomy of the Ph.D., if you run the academic gantlet of hungry Pilgrim hands and survive their tearing nails, more power to you. They may leave you out in the snow to freeze, or brand you as a heretic, but some feeble survivors of the purge will be applauding, albeit silently, not daring even to show our faces in the window.

I mean what, exactly, is the problem? That you pursue this in secret? That it feels out of control? And why do you pursue it in secret? Is it shamefully lowbrow and secular? Is it not the high, striving, virtuous text approved by the academy? Is it not the wifely, dutiful rack you are supposed to be stretched out on, the Pilgrim's wheel of commerce and progress where you are supposed to be laboring when you are not cleaning house and suckling the young? I suggest you examine the setting here, and look for the character's motivation. Why is this your problem and not the world's?

If you yourself were a character in one of these plots, would your pursuit of secret pleasure in words brand you as evil and wrong? Or rather would there not be intense identification with you across the land, as people just like you are seeking the same thing, something ancient and bright, some artifact of a true, untrammeled soul with its innocent need for narrative, something mythlike and linear in a world of exploded stories. And who could blame you for crossing the line, when the fences between reader and text and writer have rotted and fallen anyway, when we are all enmeshed like strangers on a train in the same humming engine of creation and retelling?

Are they going to put you in stocks on the village square if they catch you? Maybe they will. I wouldn't put it past them. But do us all a favor: Don't blame yourself. Blame this awful Horatio Alger cartoon we seem to be stuck in.

---

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I could go on; clearly, when it comes to Brazil, I suffer from a case of mental and sensory overload. I first went there in the summer of 1986, for a graduate-level course at the Catholic Pontifical University in São Paulo, a four-week seminar on U.S. and Brazilian social history and politics. Two decades of military dictatorship were beginning to wind down, though I can't say I noticed much beyond the classroom and the caipirinha-fueled excursions to samba clubs at night. I did, however, absorb something of the country's complex past: the Portuguese colonial rule; slavery, and the plantation economies built on sugar and coffee, rubber and cacao; the saga of its immigrants -- Lebanese and Syrians, Italians, Germans, Eastern European Jews, and Japanese; the blending of indigenous Indians, blacks, whites and every complexion in between.

After my class, I traveled a bit -- to the coast to Santos (where Pelé had played his club soccer), up to Belo Horizonte and, finally, Salvador de Bahia. Along the way, I had my share of adventures: I was mistaken for an Argentine drug-runner in Santos; I spent a night sleeping out on a bench at the Belo Horizonte bus station; I met a transvestite somewhere along the way who took me to her one-room shack (it's hard to remember -- really). And I arrived in Salvador just in time to experience a minor riot, with tanks rolling through a central plaza. But it wasn't until five years later, after a short vacation carousing in Rio with a friend, that my fascination with Brazil was rekindled and I vowed to seek a deeper connection to the country through its literature. (Needless to say, that trip had been eventful, too: There was the near drowning episode at Ipanema; the snatched passport; the infatuation with "Laura," an erotic dancer at a Copacabana club called Barbella's.)

Jorge Amado, Brazil's most celebrated novelist, was, like the country, larger than life. His novels ("Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon" and "Dona Flor and Her Two Husbands" were reissued this past fall by Vintage; "Tent of Miracles" and "Tieta" in 2003 by University of Wisconsin Press) burst with energy -- rollicking, robust, earthy tales from the northeast port cities of Ilheus and Salvador, of worker strikes, rubber booms and busts, and mulatto beauties. (The film versions of "Dona Flor" and "Gabriela," incidentally, are classic '70s softcore fare, starring the sumptuous Sonia Braga.) Amado, embraced in the U.S. during the Latin boom era of the '60s and '70s, had been pumping out hardy, proletarian-style novels since the '30s, though by the '50s they had turned more comic, lighthearted and bawdy.

The late-19th-century author Machado de Assis wrote stylish, whimsical portraits of modern bourgeois life that made him a literary phenomenon of his time (his novels were often first serialized in popular women's magazines). Machado de Assis is an original -- witty, erudite, deft and acrobatic, and endlessly inventive. You'll be won over instantly by his "Epitaph of a Small Winner" (1881), republished in 1997 as "The Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas" by Oxford University Press, and translated by Gregory Rabassa -- a titillating, quasi-philosophical reckoning on a life of missed opportunities, narrated from beyond the grave by the eccentric Brás Cubas himself. De Assis' novels cleverly anticipated the mental games and mazes of major 20th-century writers like Borges, Cortázar and Kafka.

Speaking of Kafka, equally bewitching is the Brazilian-Jewish writer Clarice Lispector, whose modernist, heavily metaphysical works have often been compared to those of the Czech master himself. Lispector, who immigrated to Brazil from a Ukrainian shtetl in 1920 when she was just 2 months old, wrote some of the most lively, raw and dizzying internal soliloquies of the past century. "I shall be as light and vague as something felt rather than understood, I shall transcend myself in waves, oh God, and may everything come and fall on me, even the incomprehension of myself at certain blank moments," she rhapsodizes in her first novel, "Near to the Wild Heart," "for I need only fulfill myself and then nothing will impede my path until death-without-fear; from whatever struggle or truce, I shall arise as strong and comely as a young colt."

"Near to the Wild Heart," published in 1944, is studded with pure, gemlike epiphanies of a young girl's coming-of-age, loveless marriage, and wrested moments of self-discovery. "The Hour of the Star," released just before she died of cancer in 1977, is a heartbreaking tale of Macabéa Cubasa, a lonely, anonymous typist from the northeast, lost in the hustle and rush of Rio. Even more achingly personal are Lispector's "Selected Cronicas" and "The Foreign Legion," which collect her short, flights-of-fancy newspaper dispatches, written between 1967 and 1973. Lispector's cronicas are a combination of sketches, meditations and portraits, penned as the mood hit her -- oblique, almost clairvoyant observations on such subjects as food and travel, motherhood, race, flowers and writerly states of grace.

Lispector, who was raised in the north in Recife before moving to Rio as a teenager, is often criticized for restricting herself to a very cloistered, white, middle-class milieu. (Black maids and cooks do make appearances and, particularly in her cronicas, Lispector can be seen straining to read their thoughts.) But a whole other side of Rio explodes off the pages of Paulo Lins' novel "City of God," a sweeping, gritty, shoot'em-up accounting of three decades in the life of one of the city's most notorious favelas, or slums. Published in Brazil in 1997, "City of God" was a labor of love for Lins, an urban anthropologist who grew up in the neighborhood himself -- an exhaustive study that morphed into a novel, became a bestseller in Brazil, and then came to international attention as the acclaimed 2002 hit film by Fernando Meirelles.

Based on stories from Rio's grim underbelly -- as the drug business spiraled into violent turf wars in the '80s -- "City of God," the novel, reads more like a news flash, a bulletin from the front lines of Brazil's social ills. Peter Robb's "A Death in Brazil," part travel memoir, part current affairs chronicle, arrives in a similar vein, but is chock-full of digressions on national dishes, drinks and folklore, while still managing to cover the historical legacies of fugitive slave communities and the Landless Movement, the sordid fall and impeachment of Fernando Collor, and the rise, stumble and rise again of Lula da Silva, Brazil's current president. Alma Guillermoprieto's "Samba" (1990), meanwhile, sways along with the crowds right into the middle of Carnival preparations with the Mangueira samba school of Rio, offering still another glimpse of the overlapping worlds of crime, drugs and poverty, as well as the irrepressible spirit, of the City of God.

At the nexus of music, art and politics, on the other hand, is Caetano Veloso's memoir, "Tropical Truth: A Story of Music and Revolution in Brazil" (2002). Veloso, the honey-voiced wonder at the heart of the Tropicália movement of the late '60s, writes passionately and intelligently of those heady days -- the anthemlike songs, the collaborations, the protests, the culturally omnivorous and bohemian spirit (even of his poignant encounters with the reclusive author Clarice Lispector). He also writes of the military's crackdown, his two months in prison and exile in London, as well as the shimmering cast of other artist-iconoclasts of Tropicália: Gilberto Gil (now minister of culture), Gal Costa, Maria Bethania and Chico Buarque, among others. (Buarque, by the way, is also the author of several Kafkaesque novels of his own -- most recently "Budapest" (2003), a wordy, cerebral tale of a Rio ghostwriter haunting the streets of the baroque Hungarian capital.)

But, finally, no portrait of Brazil is complete without at least an attempt to fathom the national sport -- to surrender to it, exult in it, be transported by it. Take Alex Bellos' "Futebol: Soccer, the Brazilian Way" (2002). In the lead-up to the 2002 World Cup, Bellos, a British foreign correspondent, immersed himself in the game's culture as a way into the Brazilian psyche: He travels to Brasilia and the Amazon to catch matches; he attends monster-car soccer rallies; he makes a pilgrimage to the dirt-poor hometown of the gifted but self-destructive dribbling wizard Garrincha; he investigates allegations of fixing and fraud in the Rio big leagues; and he marvels at the sheer pull the sport exerts over the country's collective self-image. Transcendent beauty, as well as pathos and a mass of contradictions -- it's all there: in the feverish rush of Lispector, the hypnotic voice of Caetano, the pirouettes of Ronaldinho. What more can you ask for from one country?

Last winter, in a long travel piece, the New York Times finally allowed that "there are now a few safe pockets [of Colombia] beginning to attract foreigners." That's an optimistic view of what is at least an off-the-beaten-path destination, permanently listed in State Department travel warnings. Colombia is still cruel, and the drug war -- remember? -- refuses to be won, as leftist, right-wing and military armed conflict enters its fifth decade. The Lonely Planet guide, which used to be called a "travel survival kit," has simply excised the chapter on the Eastern Plains, as if the huge, parched cowboy grasslands had sunk away into the Amazon. Is it safe? As a friend used to put it: "I'd go, but I'd never take responsibility for recommending it to someone else."

The 1982 Nobel laureate, Gabriel García Márquez, might agree: He keeps residences in Colombia but hasn't lived there since beginning what his Nobel biography describes as "a more or less compulsory exile," mainly in Mexico City. Regardless, Gabo, as he is known in Colombia, remains the colossus of Colombian letters. No one comes close to his totemic status; any publication, comment or political action by Gabo wherever he is garners celebrity-level notice at home. Because passions run high around so great an author, and because Gabo's attentions have been focused on the rural and political past of his country, nothing in his oeuvre is irrelevant. But if you're new to García Márquez, try "Love in the Time of Cholera" (1988) to understand how the Magdalena River slices through the middle of Colombia's heart. If you've covered the classics of magical realism already, pick up "News of a Kidnapping" (1996) to appreciate the way the Colombian psyche absorbs, and dissipates the effects of, its seemingly endemic violence.

Of translated Colombians, only Laura Restrepo -- like García Márquez, a prizewinner and journalist -- continues to write as a magical realist: news reinvented as timeless romance by encasing specific, reported detail in a "years ago and far away" frame. This method works well in "A Tale of the Dispossessed" (2001), a precious, short love story between three of the estimated 3 million civil conflict refugees choking Colombian cities. Steinbeck's "The Grapes of Wrath," a larger tale of movement and waste, provides a fitting epigraph: "Strange things happen to people who are fleeing from terror ( ... ); some are cruel, and others are so beautiful that faith is renewed." Restrepo chronicles this faith, "the mad euphoria of being alive, so characteristic of this indescribable land," and her characters, though worn, often land on the side of beauty. "There's no country on earth as beautiful as this one," says the sheltering narrator. "No, there isn't," answers the dispossessed, "nor a more murderous one, either."

But it's a truism by now to say that magical realism, which rounded out the postwar writing that became known as the Latin American boom, is just honest reporting in a realm where absurdity reigns. To wit: A station in Bogotá's cherry-red articulated bus network has been christened "21 Angels" in memory of the schoolchildren who were crushed nearby under a falling hydraulic excavator. It's not magical realism, see, it's what actually happened: A flying steam shovel landed on top of a school bus, and 21 children who had nothing to do with war were transformed into angels.

That same urban transport system that has helped revitalize Bogotá also has several "Books to the Winds" automated kiosks, where straphangers can take and return free rider-friendly texts to read while being whisked across the sprawling Andean plateau the city continues to engulf at an alarming rate. Bogotá, where new public libraries have been designed by the country's best architects, is gearing up to be UNESCO's World Book Capital City in 2007, and an annual book fair in April has for two decades been the region's largest editorial and book-selling event -- your foreign passport gets you in free. Plan a January trip to Cartagena de Indias, Colombia's very safe Caribbean jewel, currently the set for a film version of "Love in the Time of Cholera," and you'll catch many of the writers listed here in the Guardian (U.K.) Hay Festival Cartagena, an annual weeklong literary fiesta: Pay $2 per event or splurge for a $20 pass to all 45 lectures, debates, readings and concerts, scuba gear not included.

Despite this support, book sales in Colombia are plagued by prohibitive local prices, pirates hawking hot texts on the street and the shadow of García Márquez. Post-Gabo writers don't have it easy in a place where "it is often a matter of life and death not to tell a single truth," as one of Restrepo's characters puts it. Two contemporary authors, Fernando Vallejo and Jorge Franco, both recently given high-profile English translations, explore an increasingly urban reality, as opposed to the rural, timeless and universal fantasy of the magical realists -- the young writers' stone to Gabo's Goliath. Vallejo, who lives in Mexico City, depicts in "Our Lady of the Assassins" (1994) a disillusioned returning writer in love with a series of young male assassins. Nothing sacred in Colombian society, from iconic liberator Simón Bolívar to the Roman Catholic Church, is spared Vallejo's ecstatic rage. "Colombia changes," laments the narrator, "but remains the same, this is the new face of the same old disaster."

It's no accident that Vallejo and Franco are both from Medellín, the regional capital that shepherded the first great drug lord and the thorny prosperity and scourges in his wake. (Read Mark Bowden's masterly, intricate "Killing Pablo" (2001) to grasp the fascination -- and the almighty dread -- "Don Pablo" Escobar continues to evoke for Colombians even 13 years after his death.) Medellín may be "wrapped in the arms of two mountain ranges," as it's described in Franco's "Rosario Tijeras" (1999), but there's nothing precious about the ferocity of the Colombian "barrio popular." Franco's young sophists, lacking formal education but superbly schooled in cruelty, observe with casual innocence events only readers can recognize as unjust. As Emilio, the lovelorn and slumming narrator, says, "We don't know how long our history is, but we can feel its weight." Rosario's last name, Scissors, is a sobriquet bestowed after one of many acts of violence against "being born to misfortune." In the book, a corpse gets shot (again) in his casket while another gets paraded around his favorite salsa bars. Franco, Vallejo and others writing in an urban noir vein defiantly turn over the decayed log of Colombian society to examine the activity underneath, seeking that combination of thrilling revulsion and incredulous wonder that Colombia seems so adept at provoking: extremes of terror and beauty.

Extremes that are reflected in a geography the size of France, more stunning and varied than war stories might suggest: two oceans, 51 protected parks (granted, some of them closed for "situations of public order"), 17,000-foot volcanoes you can drive up to provided they're not spewing, whale migrations, freshwater dolphins, thermal baths, a five-colored river, more than half of the world's high-altitude tropical tundra and the planet's greatest diversity of birds.

In fact, one of Colombia's finest books is the work of intrepid ornithologists. "A Guide to the Birds of Colombia" (1986), an 800-page tome with color plates to make Audubon weep, comes with the marvelously understated, "One note of caution. Several potentially productive areas may no longer be visited safely." And Appendix A, "Finding Birds in Colombia," offers a phrase that might apply as well to Colombian letters as to its fauna: "Despite the great diversity of birdlife in Colombia many of the more interesting species cannot be found readily without considerable knowledge of habitats and localities." But because it's Colombia, there's a complementary handbook, published by the Convention on International Trade of Endangered Species, given to park rangers and airport and port personnel, and spread around rural markets: a full-color guide to all the birds illegally bought and sold in paradise.

When he walked off toward a ramshackle shed, leaving the book on the ground, I strolled across to see what he had just smoked -- a Slovak translation of the Romanian writer Emile Cioran. Nothing goes without saying. The boy had taken the page down into his lungs.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

If the Roma -- or the Gypsies -- are known for anything beyond the traditional clichis of lying, cheating, stealing, it is a historical distrust of the written word. As Europe's most consistently persecuted minority -- having suffered through centuries of slavery, the Holocaust, and an ongoing dose of government-sanctioned racism -- they are recognized primarily as an oral culture. There is no great Gypsy poet who has been acknowledged across boundaries. There are few writers who have given voice to the 12 million people of Romani heritage around the world (almost the same number as there are Jewish people). There is no overarching book, or myth, or written structure around which the Gypsies have gathered. In fact, apart from a few notable exceptions, there is very little literature about the Roma at all.

A good place to begin, though, is with Isabel Fonseca's "Bury Me Standing," a wonderfully complete nonfiction examination of the situation of Europe's Gypsies. Fonseca's book caused some scuffling among Romani scholars -- as any book written by an outsider probably will -- but at its core it is a very dignified and honest attempt to pull back a curtain and gaze through the window. Written with great style and verve, it is as if Fonseca puts a hot coin to the frosted glass and allows us to peep through. "Bury Me Standing" is possibly the most thorough popular account of the situation of the Roma in Europe.

For me, Fonseca's book reached into my rib cage and turned my heart a notch backward. I was hooked. The book was a launching pad into a world I had never expected to enter, but I ended up corralled by Fonseca's image of Papusza, the Polish-born Romani poet, and for the following four years I traveled, literally and figuratively, through the Gypsy world, most prominently in Slovakia.

For all my travels, though, I seldom saw a book in a Gypsy household. Some of these houses were among the poorest I have seen anywhere in the world -- mud and wattle huts in the eastern part of the country, tiny flats in the wasteland of Bratislava's Petralka, cardboard shacks in a settlement known as the dog-eater's camp. On the other hand, there was music everywhere -- record players, violins, satellite dishes tuned to MTV, radios, and even one electronic piano in a makeshift brick hut. But no books.

"You can't eat books," a social worker said to me one afternoon. "When you're hungry you don't have time to write about it."

Fair enough, but the function of literature is to find dignity in the most common human trait of all -- storytelling. Stories are the vast human democracy. And if anyone has a story, it is the Roma, who are, of course, as internally diverse as any other culture. Where are the stories of the Gypsy doctors? Where are the tales of the Gypsy psychologists?

Given a rich language, and narrative abilities so easily apparent in song, it would seem that a literature by the Gypsies, or even one of the Gypsies, should be more prominent and varied than it is. But the Romani culture is not exactly an easy one to penetrate. Scholarly works are still thin on the ground. Great novels are few and far between. Poems are sporadic and untranslated. And there is another kind of silence too -- the Gypsy as clichi, clicking her fingers, throwing back her hair, jangling her bracelets, fingering your wallet, breaking the hearts of fearless men.

One of the most prominent scholars to break the mould is Ian Hancock, a British-born Roma who now heads up the Romani Archives in the University of Texas. Hancock is the sort of man who has to live with the sniggers when he is introduced as a "Gypsy intellectual" -- as if that sort of thing is an aberration. But he rides the current quite brilliantly. Hancock put together "The Roads of the Roma," a PEN anthology of Gypsy writers. In this volume, he has collected an impressive array of 43 poems and prose pieces, some of which are translated into English for the very first time. The book also chronicles an 800-year history of oppression that, in itself, reads like a poem.

In a more scholarly vein, Hancock's "The Pariah Syndrome" is an account of Gypsy slavery (yes, slavery) and persecution, the first major English language examination of one of Europe's most shameful episodes. Hancock estimates that well over half of the entire Romani population of Europe was enslaved from the 14th century until the 19th century. The subject is not on any European school curriculum, nor is it acknowledged by any government.

"The world does not yet appear to believe that the enslavement of Gypsies ever happened," says Hancock, who notes that Matio Maximoff's novel, "La Prix de la Liberte" (1955), about a group of Kalderdash slaves, has never been published in English.

"Hardly much more is available on the fate of the Gypsies in the Holocaust," he says. "If this is not a cause for concern among the non-Gypsy population, if that population is reluctant to be reminded about what it has done, and what it continues to do, then the Romani voice must be louder. But one way or another, it will be heard."

More and more, Hancock's call is being answered.

One Slovakian writer who managed to publish her memoirs is Ilona Lackova. Her "A False Dawn: My Life as a Gypsy Woman in Slovakia" is not a brilliantly written book but it is an important historical document, and it shows just how hard it was, and still is, to get ahead in the world and still call oneself a "Gypsy."

The Polish-born poet Bronislawa Wajs (nicknamed "Papusza") became the poster girl for a sort of "Black Is Beautiful" movement instituted in the 1950s, but she was exiled by her own people and spent eight months in a mental asylum. Apart from a brief burst of poetry in the late 1960s she did not write much again. She died, in 1987, in a cottage in southern Silesia. Her poems are found scattered on the Internet and in various anthologies and will one day -- one hopes -- be collected in a full volume. Many of her poems, though, were burned and are gone forever.

The late Milena H|bschmannova, Eva Davidova, Michael Stewart, Donald Kenrick and Thomas Acton are just a few of the scholars who have put their fingers on the Romani pulse. Louise Doughty and Margriet de Moor have written powerful novels. Jan Yoors' "The Gypsies" is a fascinating account of a way of life that is fast disappearing. The Irish Travellers (who are not Roma) have been brilliantly examined by Michael Hayes, Juanita Casey and others.

- - - - - - - - - - - -

There is no overwhelming literary tour that one can make of Gypsy Europe and there is, as yet, no vast library that gives voice to the smithy of the Romani soul. There are, of course, no buses to the settlements. There are no package holidays to the seventh floor of the Pentagon housing project in Bratislava.

The average Romani person in Europe today -- at least those who acknowledge that they are Romani -- are faced with cultures that build walls around them, skinheads who talk of frying them with flamethrowers, politicians who pay lip service, and even beauty queens who go onstage to say they want to use their new position of privilege to rid their towns of its brown-skinned inhabitants. Even today in Slovakia, Gypsies are being burned out of their homes and local mayors talk of "whitening out" their city centers.

Still, many Romani activists take heart from history. It is fascinating to remember that the American civil rights movement really only fully succeeded in recent years. The word "gypsy" with its lowercase "g" is analogous to the word "nigger." Time rolls along, as time will. Young Romani poets are today beginning to make a mark. They are less and less afraid to stand up and say where they come from. They are instituting a new form of cultural memory. James Thurber once said, "Let us not look back to the past with anger, nor towards the future with fear, but look around with awareness."

A smidgen of sympathy is worth a ton of judgments. Literature has this capacity to move against the ambient noise of the day, and to change things for the better.

It is not too far a stretch to think that one day a young man, sitting on a rickety bridge, rolling tobacco, might read a page of existential philosophy before, finally, smoking it.

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. Folly's routine starts off lightly enough, as she congratulates humanity for embracing her so thoroughly. But soon the irony turns darker and harder to pin down. Folly insults people by calling them "wise," and praises them by calling them "fools." The reader becomes unsure which lines are backhanded compliments, and which are openhanded slaps. Gradually, Folly's speech turns into a sort of 16th-century "Colbert Report": a blistering condemnation of the hypocrisy, bloodthirstiness, stupidity and corruption of contemporary lay rulers and the Catholic Church, all delivered in the guise of "praise" from one of the world's first unreliable narrators.

Erasmus wrote "In Praise of Folly" in 1509, when the Netherlands didn't yet exist as such. But he hailed from Gouda and Rotterdam, and in the book, he gives Folly a couple of sly, "complimentary" lines that attest to the author's sense of nationality:

"Close to [the Brabanters] as neighbors, and also in their way of life, are my Hollanders -- for why shouldn't I call them mine? They're my devoted followers"

Nothing could be more Dutch than this wry mix of self-mockery and pride.

So what exactly are the Netherlands? For a guide to the country's birth and Golden Age, it's hard to do better than Simon Schama's "The Embarrassment of Riches." Schama's book is stuffed with plates of the great works of Dutch art of the 16th and 17th centuries, bringing visual life both to the grand historical dramas of the Eighty Years' War and to the domestic and aesthetic culture of the period. The book's title refers to a conflict Schama contends is central to the Dutch situation, that between the country's prosperity and its frugal Calvinist morality. Schama thinks the Dutch are caught in a perpetual bind between the pursuit and disavowal of riches, a constant anxiety that the wealth that testifies to the country's diligence and moral probity is itself a harbinger of immorality and disaster.

Such thematic oppositions breathe new and surprising life into the masterpieces of Dutch art and architecture. In his opening chapter, "Moral Geography," Schama introduces the "drowning room," a punishment supposedly employed in a reformist 17th-century Amsterdam prison that aimed to instill the work ethic by forcing prisoners to pump water out of an enclosure before it covered their heads. This metaphorical elision of crime, laziness and drowning (in a country dependent on vigilant communal dike maintenance to keep out the sea) leads Schama to the recurrent Dutch concern with the word "overvloed," used both to refer to the floods that follow dike breaks, and also to the wealth that flooded the country in the era of its mercantile dominance. This in turn brings in masterpieces depicting floods, by Brueghel and others; the invocation of God's drowning of Pharaoh and his soldiers in patriotic Dutch literature; the related drama of the deliberate flooding of Leiden, which routed the Spanish siege of 1598; and so forth. The book's great accomplishment is to defamiliarize the gorgeous kitsch of classic Dutch culture, and to situate it in a context of historical upheaval, commercial revolution and moral anxiety.

Holland owes its world-beating cuteness to the glorious 17th century, with its brick houses and storybook canals. But so much of the country's 17th century is preserved, in part, because the 18th and 19th centuries were much poorer. For a sense of the narrowness of Dutch life on the verge of the modern age, the traveler would do well to read one of the novels of Louis Couperus, such as "Langs Lijnen van Gelijdelijkheid" (1900), published in English as "Inevitable."

Couperus' subject was the constriction and self-righteousness of Dutch social life. In "Inevitable," Couperus follows Cornelie de Retz van Loo, a young woman from The Hague's snooty upper class, who takes the then extraordinary step of divorcing her cold diplomat husband, and is repaid with social exclusion. Cornelie flees to Italy, scandalizing society by moving in with a free-thinking Dutch painter. They are happy but desperately poor, and gradually, irresistibly, Cornelie drifts back to her miserable ex-husband. The opposition between Cornelie's dreams of Southern passion and the dull conformism that strangles them is one you're likely to encounter repeatedly in Holland; think about it if you find yourself in conversation with a pale Amsterdammer who wants to tell you about his spiritually enlightening trip to India.

World War II was an epochal event in Dutch history. One of the first signals of what would follow was the idiosyncratic 1947 novel "De Avonden" ("The Evenings"), by the young Gerard Reve. Reve, who died this year, was gay and intensely funny, and he would become one of the most original of the provocateurs who reinvented Dutch culture in the 1960s and '70s.

"The Evenings" is a book about the absurdity of late adolescent boredom. Twenty-three-year-old Frits lives with his parents, enduring a tedious daily routine of arguments over control of the radio dial and the whereabouts of the key to the coal cellar. He escapes on excursions with an odd clique of friends -- to the movies and the dance hall, or for evenings in their chilly, half-decorated flats. Frits entertains the gang with viciously inappropriate comments in a high, ironic style. (Is a friend's infant son, whose head keeps nodding, just going through a phase? "'Let us hope so,' said Frits, lighting another cigarette off of Viktor's. 'But it is quite possible that the child is crazy.'")

In some ways, "The Evenings" is a Dutch "Catcher in the Rye." But it's underscored by an unspoken darkness, partly emanating from the war, partly from forbidden sexuality. In one feverish late-night conversation, Frits teases his petty-criminal friend Maurits into revealing his fantasy of tying another boy to a table, naked, and torturing him to death. The book paints Dutch society in the late '40s as a mute pressure cooker of repressed grief and desire. (Amazingly, "The Evenings" has never been translated into English. Try the movie version, "De Avonden" [1989].)

In the '60s, the top of the Dutch pressure cooker blew off. For a taste of how that felt, one might try "Turkish Delight" ("Turks Fruit") by Jan Wolkers, who, like Reve, is among the "big four" of postwar Dutch writers. (The other two are W.F. Hermans and Harry Mulisch.) "Turkish Delight" features plenty of promiscuity and bohemian revelry. And, confirming Schama's point about Dutch moral anxiety, it ultimately chalks up the escapades of its wild heroine to a fatal brain tumor. The book has been translated, but may be hard to find; but, again, you can always watch the 1973 movie, often voted the best Dutch film of all time, which features lots of nudity and a young Rutger Hauer.

Another way to capture those years would be to turn to 1992's "The Discovery of Heaven," by another of the big four, Harry Mulisch. Mulisch, the child of a Jewish mother, was protected during the war by his Christian banker father, and went on to become a key figure in the swinging, Castro-sympathizing '60s left. In "The Discovery of Heaven," Mulisch reuses his own biography for one of the characters, the astronomer Max.

The plot hinges on the intense friendship between Max and Onno Quist, the polymath child of a former prime minister. Both become involved with the beautiful Ada, a cellist first seduced by Max before she marries Onno. (Fun fact: Ada's parents' used-book store, where Max sweeps her off her feet, is called "In Praise of Folly.") On a visit to revolutionary Cuba, both men sleep with Ada, and she becomes pregnant with a son by one or the other -- a child who may or may not be some kind of messiah. The book leaps ahead to the '80s, sketching Dutch society at the moment of its greatest self-satisfaction: a time when the Dutch thought they had solved the full range of modern social problems, from drug use to sexual openness to religious and cultural pluralism to the balance between capitalism and socialism.

Since the late 1990s, the left-wing consensus that governed Dutch society from the '70s on has begun to disintegrate. The rock upon which it has foundered is the Dutch Muslim population, immigrants from Morocco and Turkey and their children, who are now 1 million of Holland's 16 million inhabitants. For a guide to the Netherlands in the current moment of transformation, there is no better book than Ian Buruma's recent "Murder in Amsterdam: The Death of Theo van Gogh and the Limits of Tolerance."

Van Gogh was a hilariously tasteless television and film director, who collaborated with the feminist Muslim activist Ayaan Hirsi Ali in 2004 to produce a film about Muslim women's abuse at the hands of Muslim men. A Dutch Muslim extremist murdered him on an Amsterdam street soon thereafter. Buruma takes an insightful and even-handed approach to the twin phenomena of Muslim violence and Dutch Islamophobia, showing how the hysteria of the clash between Islam and "enlightenment values" is just one part of a generally hysterical, throw-the-bums-out mood that has seized Dutch society in recent years. The book is a must read to understand the tensions that are reshaping the Dutch social landscape today.

Obviously, there are a number of subjects that don't fit into this compilation. For instance, anyone who visits the Netherlands ought to read something about Dutch graphic or urban design. One suggestion: David Winner's "Brilliant Orange," a terribly clever 2001 book that relates the genius of Dutch soccer to the genius of Dutch spatial efficiency -- thereby taking care of two crucial Dutch subjects that we haven't yet covered.

But one can't read everything. In any case, this is an interesting time to visit the Netherlands. On the one hand, the country's peculiar and much-admired social and political character remains very much in evidence. On the other hand, it is being transformed by immigrant communities, Muslim, Caribbean and African, and many of the political bargains that have shaped the country's image abroad are being renegotiated. It's often difficult, in today's Holland, to understand quite what you're looking at. Which makes it all the more important to get a passing familiarity with the country's background literature before one goes, and get a little further than the clichis. It really isn't all about bicycles, canals and smoking first-rate Dutch weed.

That said, bicycles, canals and smoking first-rate Dutch weed are an enormous lot of fun, too.