In the Dutch Mountains [Paperback]

In the Dutch Mountains began as a story with the title The Snow Queen. It was intended to be filmed but the film was never made. Based on the Hans Christian Andersen story, it pays homage to Andersen openly.

The Snow Queen is one of Andersen's most remarkable tales; a plea for the precious uniqueness of childhood, an appeal against the premature induction of the child into rationality. Little Kai is stolen by the Snow Queen and kept captive in her castle in the cold and snowy North. His faithful playmate, Gerda goes in search of him and after many adventures and tribulations she arrives, borne on the back of a reindeer, at the Snow Queen's great hall of ice.

Here, she finds Kai, blue with cold, playing an endless solitary game, trying to fit shards of ice together like puzzle pieces. Gerda's warm tears melt the ice around Kai's heart and he is freed from the Snow Queen's spell.

In Nooteboom's version, Kai and Gerda become Kai and Lucia, a beautiful, happy couple who share a life and make a living as illusionists for the theater. In their act, Kai blindfolds Lucia and holds up an object before her, which she then "sees." This couple is of one mind and their serene perfection is continually compared to the reunited halves of a self that, as in the fable of Plato's Symposium, has been split in two.

This happiness and oneness arouses the jealousy of a mysterious femme fatale, who has Kai kidnapped and whisked off to her own castle. There she keeps him in thrall, obliterating his memories of Lucia while subjecting him to her lust. For this coldly beautiful mistress, Kai feels a mixture of both fear and desire.

Near the end of this story the novelist-narrator, who by this point is indistinguishable from Nooteboom, himself, gets entangled in a debate about truth and fiction tinged with shades of Plato, Milan Kundera and Hans Christian Andersen. "Why," asks the narrator, "do I have this irrepressible desire to fictionalize, to tell lies?" "From unhappiness," answers Andersen. "But you are not unhappy enough. That's why you can't bring it off."

This is the most penetrating self-insight in this novel, which, like the rest of Nooteboom's fiction, is as much about its own processes and raisons d'être as it is about the fictitious activities of its characters. Despite contortions of self-reflexiveness that in another writer (Samuel Beckett, for instance) might give rise to agonies of the spirit, Nooteboom and his narrator-atavars seem far too urbane, too cosmopolitan and too much at home in the world to genuinely suffer. This is Nootebooms particular affliction as a writer: perhaps he is just too intelligent, too sophisticated, too cool, to be able to commit himself to the grand illusion of fiction.

At one of its most reflexive levels, Nooteboom's fiction has, of necessity, been about a search for a level of emotion that can be carried over undiminished into literary creativity. In the Dutch Mountains, Andersen's diagnosis turns out to be correct: for all the wit, for all the insight into self and its fictions, for all the elegance of style, there is finally just not enough raw emotion to drive the story forward.

This novel has all traits of Cees Nooteboom's oeuvre - a lot of ideas, concepts and insights compressed in a slim volume, several levels of narrative, exquisite composition, excellent language (kudos also to translator).But some enigmatic quality of story makes its gist elusive and even criptic and any interpretation only relative. It is a fairy tale told by Alfonso Tiburon, a Spanish engineer, so we have at least two levels of narrative: a fairy tale per se and some thoughts of its author concerning literature and life. Both levels are rather uncomplicated apart: retold 'Snow Queen' with addition of Plato's concept of androgynes and some facts of Triburon's life with addition of his literary and philosophical opinions. The mystery appears when you peruse both levels simultaneously, and here Cees Nooteboom is at his best. Tiburon starts his tale with perfect beauty and perfect happiness (a perfect man Kai, a perfect woman Lucia and their perfect love) and promises to finish it with them. The beginning of the fairy tale resembles Andersen's story: Kai is abducted by Snow Queen, Lucia undertakes his quest. But this story 'happened not so very long ago' and the world seriously changed since Andersen's days. Today 'Snow Queen' is just a nickname of mob female bellwether, today perfect people can't keep their innocence and perfection any more. Kai becomes a silent lover of his cool mistress and, at the same time, a chauffeur during gang inroads. All this is at least motivated and justified by his painful eye. Lucia falls a prey to some lecherous wandering preacher and achieves a total blank in his embraces without any intrusion of splinted glass. But a fairy tale has its own laws that differ it from a real life. Some external events but not internal fortitude mend the situation. And now Lucia recommences her search leaving behind her new lover. A feeble ghost of Andersen's courageous heroine, she only dreams of robbers, of reindeer, of a girl with a knife. Happy end is a law of fairy tales: Kai and Lucia reunites again but where are promised perfect beauty and perfect happiness. The happy 'ever after' exists only in words (or in longing) but not in reality. There were love lost and some kind of reconciliation. But there was no real redemption and so there is no real perfection. Is a human being so weak today, is he/she powerless to face the evil of the world? In last chapter Tiburon recalls his childhood, the time when a child sees 'the brave new world' without its shortcomings. And previously, somewhere in the middle of the novel, he told us that the author who writes fairy tales distorts reality. 'It is, after all, possible that distortions may make something clear about form'. Nooteboom's opinion concerning modern world is far from optimistic. But nevertheless he believes that Kai and Lucia can be happy together after their ordeal. But a way to new perfect happiness will not be so short and easy as it was in the fairy tale. A wonderful novel!

Are you a recovering someone? In the Dutch Mountains is a spell-binding tale of love lost, redemption, and reconciliation. Cees Nooteboom weaves a story from the view of Tiburon, a Spanish engineer, in the same fashion that he presents his narrative of travels across central Spain in Roads to Santiago. A must read.