Going Dutch

We British like to think of ourselves as a cosmopolitan island race, outward-looking and worldly, yet we can be a parochial lot, too. We heap opprobrium on the Arab world for its failure to translate more than a handful of books into Arabic each year and yet our own record of translating contemporary foreign writers into English makes us seem more insular than international in our literary appetites.

Perhaps this is one reason I had never heard of the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom until last year, when I was asked to review his latest collection of travel writing, Nomad’s Hotel: Travels in Time and Space. By the time I had finished it, reeling with wonder, scrawling rapturous notes all over it and dog-earing every other page to mark yet another felicitous phrase, I felt thoroughly ashamed of my ignorance. And yet the most basic research reveals the Dutchman to be a leading literary light in Holland, fêted perennially as a possible winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature (he would be a worthy winner). A.S. Byatt, perhaps one of the few Nooteboom aficionados this side of the Channel, is a big fan. She regards him as ‘one of the greatest modern novelists’. And, it turns out, he has been translated into English, at least in America. For those who have yet to encounter Nooteboom (what pleasure awaits you!), Nomad’s Hotel seems the perfect place to begin. This collection of elegant essays on his travels over the past four decades is, as the subtitle suggests, a journey through space and time. If that sounds a little obvious, I should explain. Nooteboom is one of the most introspective and self-conscious travel writers you will come across. He dwells, with wit and whimsy, on the nature and meaning of travel, analyses his responses to situations and events without ever sounding precious, and has a Proustian fascination with time. In the introductory chapter he reflects on travel and writing, wondering whether the genuine traveller is always in the eye of the storm, ‘the storm being the world, the eye that with which he views it’.

Once, when I had no way of knowing what I now know, I chose movement, and later on, when I understood more, I realized I would be able, within this movement, to find the silence necessary in order to write; that movement and silence are balanced in a union of opposites. That the world, with all its drama and crazy beauty, its baffling vortex of countries, peoples and histories, is itself a traveller in an endlessly voyaging universe, a traveller on its way to new journeys, or, to put it in the words of Ibn al-Arabi: ‘As soon as you see a house you say, this is where I want to stay, but scarcely have you arrived before you leave again, in order to be on your way once more.’

You will struggle to find a page in Nomad’s Hotel that does not contain at least one sparkling sentence. How about this, for example, describing a 1975 journey to Isfahan on a plane brimming with businessmen? ‘I am on my way to a poem, they to a boom country.’ On a boat trip up the Gambia, he runs into a young Peace Corps idealist, an American woman who ‘resembles the beginning of a novel which is destined to have an unhappy ending’. An elderly British woman has ‘the sort of face that can move mountains. English dog breeders have often striven to reproduce such faces, but they still look better on people.’ We don’t know how long he stayed in Gambia but once he returns to Daka he writes, ‘I have reached that curious mix of fullness and regret, when there are only two choices left: either you leave immediately or you stay for a year. Anything in between produces a bad piece of writing.’ I recommend this observation to any travel writer justifying prolonged absences to husband or wife. Nomad’s Hotel is a treasure-house of travels: to Venice and Munich, Canberra and Mali . . . The destinations hardly matter, in fact, such is the sweeping power and seduction of his prose. In the Irish islands of Aran he goes potty about meeting the writer (and fellow Proust obsessive) Tim Robinson, author of two densely detailed volumes about the storm-tossed island. There is even a chapter on Nooteboom’s ideal, idealized hotel. No place for televisions, you will be pleased to hear. If Nomad’s Hotel is a fine primer to Nooteboom the travel writer, then The Following Story, probably his best-known work, sees him emerge as novelist triumphant. I tried to pick up a copy as soon as I had finished Nomad’s Hotel and was met with blank expressions in bookshops. It is a novella originally published in 1991 with an initial print run of a mere 540,000. Lest any struggling novelists despair at such a phenomenal quantity, it is worth explaining that it was specially commissioned for Holland’s Book Week, in which copies of a selected new novella are given away free with any significant purchase of books. Bookshops need an awful lot of them, in other words. That caveat aside, it won Nooteboom the 1993 European Literature Prize. Struggling novelists, after the temporary reprieve, can despair again. The Following Story is a masterpiece of imagination and illusion. Herman Mussert, nicknamed Plato, Socrates and Dr Strabo, is a onetime Greek and Latin teacher turned writer of travel guides, ‘a moronic activity whereby I earn my living, but not nearly as moronic as all those so-called literary travel writers who can’t resist pouring out their precious souls over the landscapes of the entire planet, just to amaze the middle classes’. One night he goes to bed in Amsterdam, only to wake up the following morning in a hotel room in Lisbon. It is exactly the same room, he quickly realizes, in which twenty years ago he indulged in a doomed love affair with Maria Zeinstra, a woman whose interest in Herman was only a form of revenge against her philandering husband. Both husband and wife were colleagues of Herman until his teaching career ended in a blur of fists on the school playground. He didn’t get the girl. Tenses merge and separate with discomfiting ease as we rove the corridors of Herman’s time-soured imagination while he tries to fathom the time-space disjunction at the heart of his predicament. It would not be spoiling this multi-layered fantasy to reveal that Herman, as he himself surmised at the beginning of the book, is actually dead, though it is never easy in these pages to disinter the past from the present. In a sense he died with the end of his illicit liaison. Passion, where it is ignited, tends towards the literary, even when it is sexual. Maria, sitting in on his lecture on Ovid, is like a burst of rhetorical Viagra for Herman as he tells his class the story of Phaethon crashing to his death after losing control of horses belonging to his father Helios, the sun god. It is Herman’s – and Nooteboom’s – finest moment.

My flames set forests ablaze, I see the poisonous, black sweat of the gigantic Scorpion as it raises its tail to sting me, the earth catches fire, the meadows burn to white ashes, Mount Etna spits fire back at me, the ice melts on mountaintops, rivers boil over their banks, I pull the vulnerable world with me in my fate, the incandescent chariot searing my body, the Babylonian Euphrates is alight, the Nile flees in mortal terror and hides its source, all existence laments, and then Jupiter hurls his lethal bolt of lightning which bores right through me, burning me and dashing me out of the chariot of life, the horses break free and I am flung like a blazing star to earth, my body implodes in a hissing stream, my corpse like a charred rock in the water . . .

In the second half of this light but deceptively disturbing story, Herman boards a ship sailing from Lisbon to Brazil. Darkness and mystery swirl about him and his fellow passengers. ‘The water of the ocean looked black; it reeled, tossed, sailed away into itself, furling and unfurling, glistening sheets of liquid metal collapsing soundlessly, merging, each wave ploughing a furrow for the next to fold into, the inexorable, perpetual change into perpetually the same.’ We do not know why he is there and he only finds out for himself at the very end of the book, by which point, strangely, but for reasons which become clear, it is time to reread The Following Story. There is a pleasing circularity to it all. ‘The world’, as Herman remarks, ‘is a never-ending cross-reference.’

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 13 © Justin Marozzi 2007