From Publishers Weekly
Nooteboom ( In the Dutch Mountains ) is a Dutch writer who has been compared to Nabokov and Borges. This novel, originally published in the Netherlands in 1982, is a daunting work, a melange of moods, fragments and multiple viewpoints. Blocked novelist Andre Steenkamp seeks release on a Mediterranean island, where, amidst a group of eccentric, artistic expatriates, he falls in love with the mysterious Clara. We already know that Steenkamp dies; the narrator is a friend attempting to complete the novelist's work from chaotic notes and from his own impressions of Steenkamp's life. A fugue-like exploration of death and primal emotions overlaps with suppositions about Steenkamp's angst as man and artist. At the completion of his friend's story, the narrator says, "What a tangle of lies and deceits I have created . . . and how strong does he emerge from it!" The reader will likely concur with the first part of this assessment without endorsing the last.
Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
From Library Journal
In this novel, Nooteboom, a leading Netherlands poet, playwright, novelist, and travel writer who won the Pegasus Prize for Literature in 1983 for Rituals ( LJ 3/1/83), focuses on a small group of expatriates living on an island off the coast of Spain and drifting through surreal and overwrought lives. Andre Steenkamp, an aspiring Dutch novelist, is preoccupied with thoughts of death, guilt, and the hopelessness of the human condition. His despondent companions do nothing to elevate his moods or prospects in life. The narrator is an acquaintance of Steenkamp who writes The Knight Has Died after Steenkamp's death. A dark, impressionistic tale filled with vivid images of places and thoughts.
- Dean Willms, Fort Collins P.L., Col.Copyright 1990 Reed Business Information, Inc.
