The Second Circle

Review

ALL SOULS DAY
by Cees Nooteboom
reviewed by Fionn Meade

The newest novel from acclaimed Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom portrays the city of Berlin as a place literally scarred by prevalent spectres of our time: terror and a related will to forget engendered by an excess of harrowing images.
The protagonist, Arthur Daane, is a 42-year-old Dutch documentary filmmaker whose wife and son died in a plane crash some years before. Daane has since become, as his friend Erna back in Amsterdam dubs him, a "disaster expert first-class with honours," hiring on as a cameraman to trouble spots around the world in an effort to fend off his own ghosts. Berlin, "a memento you could wander around in for years," serves as his intermittent home. When not traveling to Estonia, El Salvador or Bosnia, Daane puzzles via his camera over a city both "triumphant and humiliated, defiant and chastened."

ALL SOULS DAY
by
Cees Nooteboom

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His Berlin perambulations become an odd form of elegy: a vacant lot where metal barriers, barbed wire and viewing platforms once stood is juxtaposed with a random shot of passing hubcaps; the bullet marks still visible in building facades are placed beside footprints in the snow; an absurd post placed in the middle of a river outside the city in order to divide East from West is spliced together with a century-old tree and its autumnal shedding. Why and for whom Daane comprises his poetic catalogue of "things we overlook" remains an open question throughout. The reticent hero seeks occasional refuge from his isolation within an eccentric circle of friends consisting of Arno, an endlessly referential German scholar, Zenobia, a boisterous Russian physicist, and Victor, a Dutch sculptor who works in stone and dresses like a prewar dandy. Their lofty rhetorical exchange in cosy restaurants allows Nooteboom to range freely and often lightly among such weighty topics as German guilt, the poetics of science and the rise of terrorism.
It is only when Elik, a Dutch-Spanish graduate student with her own haunted past, snares Daane's interest that Nooteboom's novel shifts to a plot-driven finale in the streets of Madrid. While the characters can seem static and precious at times, the author's erudite compassion for an increasingly chaotic world is, more often than not, timely and provocative.

Fionn Meade

This piece first appeared in the Seattle Times and is reprinted by kind permission of the author.

Contributions by Fionn Meade to The Second Circle:

An Interview with Jim Crace
An Interview with Michael Ondaatje
Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian
All Souls Day by Cees Nooteboom
Brief Reviews including John Wray and Rachel Seiffert