In The Dutch Mountains (Paperback)

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.

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