Cees Nooteboom is a Dutch poet who writes widely in other genres. Although he is best known for his fiction and travel reportage (with internationally published and honored books in both categories), his approach — one of intent, even relentless, rhythmic observation — produces writing that is fundamentally poetic. This quality is well demonstrated by 533 Days, his most recent book to appear in the United States. As rendered by Laura Watkinson (and elegantly brought out by Yale University Press’s Margellos World Republic of Letters), from its first sentences the texture of Nooteboom’s distinctive sensibility is carried into English translation: “The flowers of cactuses cannot be compared to other flowers.”
The volume is essentially a journal, a collection of thoughts belonging to a set of days spent mostly on Menorca, where the poet lives for part of the year. It is a kind of diary, modestly described by Nooteboom as “something to help you preserve the occasional something from the stream of what you think, what you read, what you see.” If a topic permeating the daybook had to be named, it would perhaps be the tortoises and cactuses of his island garden. These encounters with the natural world are described by the writer as though he were a recent arrival from another planet. At such moments, Nooteboom recalls the French poet Francis Ponge through whose lines the most ordinary encounter becomes not so much exotic as truly alien. But in Nooteboom’s “poem of the eye,” such exact yet somewhat perplexed description of the natural world is quickly followed up by a counter movement, expressed almost as afterthought, that places the observation within a context of personal and cultural history. As Alberto Manguel observed, Nooteboom’s recurring subject is the essential strangeness of human experience. Not only in his travel books does he interact with the world as a perennial, albeit highly informed, foreigner.
His is the life of a cosmopolitan reader and writer. Nooteboom regularly finds himself in the company of literary peers (whether in person or through text) who, at least as set within his garden meditations, themselves come across as forms of succulents or reptiles. One particular cactus “with spines on every side,” for example, “seems to be consuming himself from within, a revolutionary without an enemy.” That this description is placed among a consideration of various German-speaking authors (Frisch, Brecht, Dürrenmatt) has a particularly amusing effect. (Germany itself figures as a presence in the book, as a portion of the daybook is written there.) Of the tortoises “who show themselves but generally do not,” he proposes “they are probably writers, of all the animals they are the ones who most resemble writers, if only because of that shell.” Such comparisons, naturally, also refer to himself. Of another plant he writes, “as if I were to consist partially of dead matter but at the same time grew limbs.” Of the familiar garden creature (with whom the cactus shares the ability to go for a long while without water) he notes the “stubbornness, willfulness, maybe even the material of which they are made, hard and tough.”
A justifiable prickliness occasionally makes itself known: He observes that out of “a combination of arrogance and provincialism,” English is “the world language into which the least is translated,” adding that “only two per cent and a crumb of the entire world’s literature is published in America, such a meagre harvest that you realise why Americans sometimes understand so little about the world.” There is also in 533 Days some sense of the writer having been criticized or, worse, dismissed as inadequately engaged as a global citizen. Yet there is a distinction between the political writer and the worldly one, and Nooteboom falls into this latter, increasingly shrinking, category. As a traveling European, nevertheless, there is no evading “bombings, refugees, elections” or news of a war (even in 2015) in the east of Ukraine,“a continuation of something that happened long ago.”
Nooteboom responds to politics and current events, but in a context of language and literature. One of his great enthusiasms is Hungarian (which he does not speak), and in a particularly beautiful extended passage he riffs on the orchestral music of two of its novelists (Bánffy and Esterhászy), drawing in the “unimaginable complications of the parliamentary history of the Habsburg monarchy,” whose political consequences extend to present-day Eastern Europe. Nooteboom is an energetic advocate for writers who should be better known, knowing full well that the encyclopedic contents of the works of a third Hungarian writer, Miklós Szentkuthy, are “not something for Kansas.” Quoting Szentkuthy, Nooteboom declares, “If I can have a role in literature it is the direct tangibility of biological lines and forms of instinct in my sentences.” Writers, like cactuses, as Nooteboom wryly observes elsewhere, “obey their DNA.”
Instead the matter of literary politics tends to enter 533 Days obliquely, as skirmishes observed in repose rather than actively fought: “I had been out there for so long, and so often.” One of my favorite entries recalls a 1962 writer’s congress in Edinburgh; Nooteboom recreates a banquet held in honor of various attending literary lights. Here’s the photographic description: “There was a noble Scottish family in kilts with colours and tartan of their clan. They wore shoes with silver buckles and daggers with silver hilts tucked into their woolen knee socks. Dinner jackets above their skirts, gleaming black bow ties, insignia.” Then comes the Dutchman’s penetrating placement in memory: “They did not so much as glance at these possible celebrities, if they even recognised them. They sat there like atavistic statues in a feudal oasis, being served from behind by people who did not look at them, and were completely sufficient unto themselves.” Not unlike the photographs of his wife, Simone Sassen, which accompany 533 Days, there is sharp focus to Nooteboom’s visual and intellectual recording. He looks closely at the leaves of Aemonium arboreum, Arnold Schwartzkopf or steps back to survey Menorca’s port of Mahon. The well-lit image is then set within the enclosing matte of his own experience; of the Edinburgh episode, “it is half a century ago, and still I remember.”
Responding to criticism about the formal demands of his fictions, Nooteboom quotes Adorno, inside whose German “it is sometimes as dark as it is now in my garden.” The quotation could be heard as a shared ars poetica for “experimental” literature: “It is only through experimentation, not through security, that art has any chance at all.” Not the dead end once predicted, Nooteboom argues, the novel is still “an undiscovered realm of possible variants” rather than “what you see around you all the time, the apotheosis of the manufactured novel, fiction as a product … the extension of an industry.” And though it would be natural for the 88-year-old Nooteboom to write about his place in such markets, 533 Days concerns itself mostly with things other than personal literary posterity. A consideration of interstellar space (revisiting the Voyager missions which appeared in his metafictional The Following Story) puts human creation into perspective. As that novel’s main character observes (as might the technologically “antiquated” technicians who continued to monitor the Voyagers), “I belong to the past.” When Nooteboom describes stars as seen at night on Menorca, recounting the mythic narratives behind the constellations’ naming, he foretells the increasing presence of satellites and a changed future night sky. It is a lonely interlude, though it echoes something of his book’s location in the solitude attached to individual experience, a multilingual sensibility expressing cosmic awareness in composed language, “making the tension between expression and meaning bear fruit.”
It has been quite effortful for American readers to get a good overview of Nooteboom’s particular qualities. There’s a wealth of English translations available for his novels, but their dates of publication make for a baffling chronology. The list of fiction available in English printed opposite 533 Days’ frontispiece, for example, is incomplete and not in any discernible order. His Rituals (listed first) was published in Dutch in 1980 and translated into English three years later, while his first novel, Philip and the Others (listed second), appeared in English in 1988, long after it was first published in Dutch in 1954. Another source of confusion is that Nooteboom’s American books are often reprints of European editions brought out by publishers like Seagull Books and MacLehose Press; the Yale publication of 533 Days, in fact, is essentially a reprint of the British book, 533: A Book of Days, brought out by MacLehose / Quercus last year.
But even setting aside issues of chronology, translation or referential difficulty, there’s the Dutchman’s problematic range extending far beyond fiction or memoir, works which defy categorization and therefore marketability. Travel writing overlaps with considerations of nature, art and history (Roads to Santiago; Roads to Berlin; Nomad’s Hotel). There are fascinating (Unbuilt Netherlands) or useful (25 Buildings You Should Have Seen / Amsterdam) guides on architecture. And then there are the informed and illuminating writings about painting, especially his books on Hieronymus Bosch and Zurbarán. I have myself encountered some excellent cross-genre “Nooteboom Readers” translated into French and put together by Actes Sud, which seems like the only adequate way to present him to new audiences.
How should 533 Days be placed in relation to Nooteboom’s many other books? As his writings tend to play off each other, familiarity with early works naturally enriches his later books’ reading. In prose form and conversational tone, 533 Days could almost be read as a companion piece to Letters to Poseidon (2014, translation by Laura Watkinson), an episodic volume that appeared ten years ago in Dutch. The harbor as “home of Poseidon,” returns in this most recent English prose, with Mediterranean wind and water recurring as secondary characters drawn from previous volumes. Another book, similarly hard to categorize save as “short essays,” is Tumbas, also referred to in passing in 533 Days. Paired with photographs by Simone Sassen, the book presents meditations on visits to the graves of various writers important to Nooteboom, a number of whom (Canetti, Brodsky, Celan) are mentioned in 533 Days. Tumbas is not yet available in English, even though a number of Americans (Mary McCarthy, for example, whom Nooteboom knew in life) may be found in it. This is certainly a book I myself would tag for translation.
But in addition to texts with photographs (accompanying, for example, Sassen’s color images in Ultima Thule), there are two collaborations with the German artist Max Neumann. Reviewed by Ron Slate in On the Seawall in 2011,* Self-Portrait of the Other (translated by David Colmer) is an illustrated prose-poetry memoir nearly impossible to place on any specific bookstore shelf. Self-Portrait of the Other is listed in 533 Days as Nooteboom’s only book of poetry translated into English. This is deceptive, though it illustrates how his turning lines have tended to be overlooked in America. Yet a selected poems (it was not called a Selected, though that’s what it was) entitled Light Everywhere (also reviewed in On the Seawall**) came out in 2014. That volume should have made more of an impression than it did. But if it was simply too intimidating for most American readers to consider fifty years’ work of an unfamiliar poet, the more modest but very beautiful Monk’s Eye (also translated by David Colmer) which came out in English 2018, would have made an excellent point of entry into Nooteboom’s poetry. Printed in York, PA, it is a perfectly lovely book with collages by Sunandini Banerjee, gorgeous poems alongside the images, all ending with a quasi-Sapphic hanging line and a final Nooteboomian “murmur of the sea.”
Which brings us to Leaving, Nooteboom’s second collaboration with artist Neumann. First published in Dutch just last year and quickly translated by David Colmer, Leaving is a poetry collection that puts many other “responses to the pandemic” to shame. Presaged by the nearly invisible threats to pines and palm trees described in 533 Days, Leaving returns to Menorca’s “man in the winter garden” now portentously clouded by Covid. While both books stem from intense awareness born of enforced isolation, a literal “withdrawing” to the island of the self, in Leaving the political animal (in the largest sense of that phrase) and solitary human are joined in poetry’s thought-movements and prosodic ambulations,
Creatures that walk upright
estranged from their origin,
strangers that think
and pay the price.
The poet considers, “How does a volume of poetry arise? You start in a garden describing Mediterranean plants, but what emerges are thoughts of the war, images from a distant past that has never disappeared.” In an afterword written from Germany’s north, Nooteboom continues: “The mysterious virus that is suddenly ruling the world has changed life here, too, and it would be strange if the poem ignored all that.” His poems read with both a personal and communal sense of mortality:
Now my feet are counting the road, I know,
looking back is not allowed. My steps measure time,
a dark and peerless poem, a beat
that can’t be slowed.
In Leaving Nooteboom finds himself yet again in a past punctuated by the world’s “fuss of a newspaper,” in a garden in which “duration / has no predicate, time no imperative.” And yet the poet remains a “child” of the Second World War, his historically ironic life (a civilian father killed by a British plane passing over Holland) the product of “the war that never stopped coming back”:
He’d seen that in the war, defeated soldiers
in retreat, frightened, dirty, the mouths
that sang so heartily when they marched in
now closed …
… He was no army but felt
the lesson like a rabbit feels the hunter’s blow,
imposed without mercy and
all over.
The three sections of Leaving are to be read as a parts of a larger composition, triadic musical movements of a chamber work. Set against “the frock of the news” the poems contain “closed figures from a / prophecy, a truth as art,” providing music’s “temporary triumph”:
Silence as a hymn …
a song
whose sound has been sealed,
the cities, the deserts of my
life wither in this music
without notes.
As with the rabbit-death afterimage quoted above, each discrete poem of three stanzas (the same form as in Monk’s Eye) ends with an ominous line space followed a final breath:
He knows, everything comes past one last time
before the end, before he’s free to go and
who knows maybe laugh like an orphan in the dark
clinging to words of poetry.
Nothing will be left undone.
Obviously Nooteboom is not just a novelist who has also written poems. Especially for those acquainted with his work, the poems in Leaving perform themselves as themes and variations of a great artist’s “late style.” In both of these recent books, “the end of the end” is a recurring topic; so is aging, with the long-lived tortoise as exemplum. As he writes, “Life changes and wants to make peace with its ending.” And so the poet’s life-long fascination with graves and tombs (Tumbas) resurfaces in Leaving; he might be seen to be writing his own epitaph:
My kind is born of water, we
were sea creatures, seeded
by the stars, scattered over water
to become the form we
know.
Early on in 533 Days, Nooteboom quotes Leopardi, and the quotation becomes a presence. Leopardi speaks in implied indirect discourse, and Nooteboom answers: “Poets should not only imitate nature and describe it perfectly, but they should do so in a natural way. Easier said than done.” Nooteboom’s observed relation to nature and literature has always presented itself on the same plane as his interactions with human islanders or recollected colleagues, person and page becoming at times interchangeable. The formal directive behind both Nooteboom’s verse and prose, the varied genres of his oeuvre, are also all of a piece: “I do my best / to still make out all kinds of things the way / I always have.” The formally “experimental” and the poetic in his work come to the same thing. “The garden is instructive,” Nooteboom writes; a close inspection of the aemonium reveals that sometimes nothing is “natural” than the forms of nature.
“There is only one way of reading,” writes Nooteboom, “and that is via delusions of reference — everything was written solely for the person who has the book in their hand at that moment.” So, too, armchair visitors to Nooteboom’s paper arboretum will encounter moments of self-discovery, something of travel’s randomness experienced as a divinely destined education. More than an industry of “manufactured” books seems to realize, there is a readership for books like 533 Days and Leaving, many who — especially at this moment — would respond to Nooteboom’s garden meditations. Alternately heady and acerbic, his writing is not so much about any subject as about thoughtful perspectives and gorgeous verbal music. Both 533 Days and Leaving are very rich and beautiful books, with episodes of illumination stumbled upon as though by coincidence. But, of course, as Nooteboom reminds us, “for readers there is no coincidence.”
[533 Days, published by Yale University Press on April 26, 2022, translated from there Dutch by Laura Watkinson with photographs by Simone Sassen, 224 pages, $25.00 hardcover / Leaving, published by Seagull Books on December 8, 2021, translated from the Dutch by David Colmer with drawings by Max Neumann, 92 pages, $25.00 hardcover]
* For Ron Slate’s 2011 review of Self-Portrait, click here.
** For his 2014 review of Light Everywhere, click here.