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
“Transmigration of the soul does not happen after
but during a life.” Nootebaum wrote his 33 texts in response to a series of
striking, raw, unsettling images drawn by Neumann in charcoal and orange paint
on brown paper bags. I ordered this book after being impressed by Neumann’s
artwork in Animalinside, his collaboration with writer Lazlo
Krasnahorkai. Nootebaum’s texts are like dreams or memories, evanescent, full of
significance without consequence and transgressing the borders of
identity.
(December 2014)
