Lost Paradise: A Novel (Hardcover)

In reading anything about the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, one usually comes across A.S. Byatt’s remark that he is “one of the greatest modern novelists.” It has been possible to evaluate this statement against the fictions of his that have been translated into English: In the Dutch Mountains, The Following Story and All Souls (all of them available in paperback from Raincoast Books). The latest to be translated (by Susan Massotty) is Lost Paradise, to be published in October. From time to time, in various anthologies, one catches glimpses of Nooteboom’s poetry as well. But in Europe, where he is an important figure, he is also renowned for his travel books, only one of which, Roads to Santiago, has been available over here-until now. Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space, translated by Ann Kelland, is a significant prize for people interested in travel writing.
Seen even more frequently than the citation from Byatt are statements comparing Nooteboom to Borges and Nabokov, or, less frequently, Italo Calvino or Paul Auster. That is to say, style is everything. Specifically, a style that is consciously artful, highly personalised and slightly detached, giving off the suggestion that it’s always on the verge of fantasy, as in this long passage from a lengthy essay on Venice:

“It is bound to happen. You have been wandering in the Academia all day, you have seen a solid mile of painted canvas, it is the fourth, the sixth or the eighth day and you feel as though you are swimming against a powerful current of gods, kings, prophets, martyrs, monks, virgins and monsters; that Ovid, Hesiod, the Old and New Testaments have accompanied you the whole way, that you are being pursued by the Lives of the Saints and Christian and heathen iconography, that Catherine’s wheel, Sebastian’s arrows, Hermes’ winged sandals, Mars’s helmet and all the lions of stone, gold, porphyry and marble are out to get you. Frescos, tapestries, gravestones, everything is charged with meaning, refers to real or imaginary events, armies of sea-gods, putti, popes, sultans, condottieri, admirals all clamour for your attention . . . ”

Admittedly, that’s a not altogether typical example of his prose. Certainly it’s an extreme instance of his hesitancy about the Catholicism in which he was reared. The allusion to monks is only one of a great many in his work, fiction, and non-fiction alike. In an essay about hotels, he likens hotel guests to “members of an order.”
He is not without skill at reporting and analysing events, as in an early piece about Iran in the days of the last Shah. His hallmark, however, is not writing about actually travelling, but rather about existing in a place, making stories from hundreds of small details instead of officially licensed facts. The kinds of hotels he likes, for example, are those with an “old-fashioned type of tap which doesn’t always work, a hall porter you would like to have had as your father, colours that are no longer in vogue, the paint peeling here and there, a surfeit of mirrors, hairline cracks in the porcelain, the wear and tear of hundreds of thousands of disappeared feet in the weave of the carpet, a lift which momentarily, but decidedly, hesitates before ascending” (and here he might be thinking of the notorious open-cage elevator at Brown’s Hotel in London, a place he mentions). Then, a few sentences later, he confesses that for a person “who may well spend months of any one year in hotels, I have a character flaw: I am afraid of hotel fires [ . . . ] Plummeting bodies, waving people not meaning to greet anyone . . . ”
In any case, his style has changed over the years-been perfected-as one can see by these pieces, which appeared in Dutch magazines and papers during a 30-year period beginning in 1971. He’s not the sort of travel writer you would likely find in the North American backwater. He doesn’t do reporting, he doesn’t guide, offer tips or merely give his impressions. He makes an art of it. He is a feuilletonist, a term that has passed from fashion because there are so few people besides Walter Benjamin or Joseph Roth whom one can point to as examples-and they’re both long dead.
George Fetherling (Books in Canada)

Eminent Dutch novelist Nooteboom (All Soul's Day) weaves an imaginative tale of redemption from the intersecting lives of travelers. After surviving a gang rape in São Paulo, a young, affluent Brazilian woman, Alma, takes off for Australia with her best friend, Almut: the two plan to train as masseuses. Nooteboom then cuts to an embittered middle-aged critic, Erik Zondag, who is cast out of his home in Amsterdam by his fed-up younger girlfriend and sent to an Alpine spa in order to dry out and become a different man. The first part of the novel tracks the two Brazilians as they travel though Australia with hope of stopping at the legendary Aboriginal Sickness Dreaming Place. Their Australian adventures take a turn involving the Angel Project, a multisite piece of participatory art in Perth. For the second part, Eric endures a punishingly ascetic stay at the Alpine spa, where he recognizes his masseuse. Framed by masterful reflections on misunderstandings in life and literature, Nooteboom's short work, at once delicate and chiseled, achieves a dreamlike suspension of time and place. (Oct.)
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