Just finished another fine read—Cees Nooteboom’s Lost Paradise—
Will cheat and paste in a review from The Complete Review website-
There are two main characters in Lost Paradise: Dutch literary critic Erik Zondag and the young Brazilian woman Alma. Nooteboom intersects their very separate lives in an unusual and feathery-light (at least on some levels) novel of fate and paradise. And angels.
Alma and her friend Almut leave Brazil after Alma drives her car, as if in a daze, into a very bad neighbourhood and quickly finds herself — as she chose to falsify it for herself — “enveloped by a black cloud”, everything stripped from her: “They had not bothered to kill her, but had simply left her behind as if she were rubbish.” The more adventurous and orderly Almut is an appropriate companion to then head out into the world with. They take a course in physical therapy massage so they’ll have a skill that is marketable everywhere and don’t have to fall back on waitressing and the like. They head to Australia, where Alma looks for some escape in the dreamtime world of the aborigines; later Alma also winds up in Austria.
Zondag, meanwhile, is a fairly dissatisfied writer, stuck the past “twenty years in the rarefied atmosphere of the literary supplement”. He’s not so much an author as a part of the literary “clean-up crew”, who had gotten his permanent position at his newspaper by making: “quite a name for himself by taking potshots at a few literary giants” . Indeed, there’s quite a bit of criticism of the Dutch literary establishment in the novel — including a swipe at the old grandees of Dutch literature, that Nooteboom-fellow among them ….. Zondag doesn’t like what’s become of the literary world — “Literature had become a career” is one of his complaints — and then:All that mediocrity week after week seemed to cling to his hair and creep under his nails.
Alma and Zondag’s paths cross, in unlikely ways, first in Australia, where Alma has gotten a job as a hidden angel (in something between performance art and tourist game), and then in Austria, when Zondag goes on a Kur. It sounds almost perfectly ridiculous — even more so in the details — and yet it’s also truly audacious. Nooteboom weaves a surprisingly intricate but still ever so light-feeling tale here, the narrative moving back and forth between the two characters (and from first to third person too), sometimes describing the seemingly mundane with a great deal of precision, other times offering only general impressions. It’s occasionally dizzying, especially in its reach across continents and shifts in voice and character, but it also pulls the reader in.
Throughout the angelic themes, and paradise (and paradise lost) also figure, but even when he literally transforms Alma into an angel he knows exactly how to handle it to avoid it becoming too ridiculous. Stuffed in a cupboard, her face turned to the wall: it’s an almost absurd situation, but both her and Zondag’s reactions to it are convincing.
Lost Paradise is remarkable in its combination of realism and its almost spiritual flights of fancy. Nooteboom is both a very attentive and imaginative writer, and he uses his talents to very good effect here. From the Prologue-chapter, in which the first-person narrator is flying to Berlin and gives a short précis of where he’s been and what he’s done — subtly foreshadowing what’s to come later in the book — Nooteboom already lets the reader see what to expect: the descriptions seem straightforward enough, even the author’s curiosity about the book an attractive woman sitting a row ahead of him is reading. He can’t catch a glimpse the title until they’ve almost landed, when he sees the two words:It’s this book, a book out of which she is about to disappear, along with me.
The playfulness and the games work, and while Lost Paradise feels (and reads) like a very light work, it lingers satisfyingly, a small but surprisingly sating morsel.
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