The noted Dutch poet and novelist Cees Nooteboom reflects on the life
of the mind through a reexamination of books, music, art, travel, and
gardening
"Nooteboom's real subject is the one that's defined his
career--mainly, the persistent strangeness of existence and its refusal
to be fully resolved by religion, philosophy, or science. . . . His
journal . . . can seem like a medieval bestiary, a nature chronicle with
the vividness of a dream."--Danny Heitman, Wall Street Journal
"Laura Watkinson's deft English translation never reads like
one."--Michael Dirda, Washington Post
Though a tireless explorer of distant cultures, Cees Nooteboom has been
returning for more than forty years to the Spanish island of Menorca. It
is in his house on this "island of the wind," with a study full of books
and a garden taken over by cacti and many insects, that the 533 days of
writing take place. The result is neither a diary nor a set of movements
of the soul organized by dates but rather a "book of days," with
Nooteboom's observations about what is immediately around him, his love
for Menorca, and his thoughts on the world, on life and death, on
literature and oblivion. Every impression opens windows onto vast
horizons: The Divine Comedy and the books it generated, Borges's
contempt for Gombrowicz, the death of David Bowie, the endless flight of
the Voyagers, the repetition of history as tragedy but never as farce.
Nooteboom resists the noise of current events yet he must return to them
several times, skeptically contemplating the threat of a disintegrating
Europe. Reading 533 Days is like having a conversation with an
extraordinary mind.
