'Letters to Poseidon' by Cees Nooteboom

Ostensibly addressed to the god of the sea, Nooteboom’s 23 ‘letters’ string together 53 other pieces of crystalline prose, the longest no more than a few pages, in which, through addressing the minutiae of his life, the most fleeting of impressions, the smallest of observations, the tiniest parts of works of art or literature, he gently interrogates the wider issues of existence, the passing of time, the way in which meaning falls from currency or is (re)located in unexpected situations, objects or conjunctions. As Nooteboom reaches old age he relinquishes certainty, or rather, he sees it abraded into nonexistence by the passing of time, and, by saying farewell to it, to the great and small mechanisms of human culture, history and science, to the places and aspects of his life that he cannot be certain he will live long enough to return to, his faculties of noticing become calmly alert to the residues of wonder and meaning that have accumulated in the less-examined, too familiar or comfortably overlooked corners of his everyday life, making the quotidian glow with new sad beauty. Nooteboom displays here the digressive intellect of Sebald with the microscopic focus of Calvino, and has produced a work that is deeply thoughtful, beautiful and rather sad.

February 2015