font size ="+2""An outstanding addition to an impressive oeuvre" Times Literary Supplement Arthur Daane, a documentary film-maker and inveterate globetrotter, wanders the streets of Berlin, a city whose recent past provides the perfect backdrop for his reflections on life and the universe as he collects images for his latest project - a film that will show the world through his eyes. With his circle of friends - a philosopher, a sculptor and a physicist - Daane discusses everything from history to metaphysics and the meaning of our contemporary existence, often over a hearty meal. Then, one cold winter's day, Daane meets the history student Elik Oranje and his world is turned upside down. And when she unexpectedly leaves the city for Spain, Daane is compelled to follow. All Souls' Day is an elegiac love story, a poignant and affecting tale in which the city of Berlin plays a prominent role, by one of Europe's major contemporary writers. Translated from the Dutch by Susan Massotty "Displays with admirable lucidity the workings of a humane, civilized, and consistently interesting mind" Kirkus Reviews "One of the most remarkable writers of our time" ALBERTO MANGUEL
It is said that during his abortive campaign to invade Britannia, the infamous Roman emperor Caligula ordered his legions into the surf to attack Poseidon and claim seashells as trophies of war. Cees Nooteboom is considerably more thoughtful in his relationship with the god of the sea. As autumn falls each year, Nooteboom writes Poseidon a letter requesting permission to return to his home in Minorca the following spring. Of course, it would be the height of discourtesy if Nooteboom's letters were no more than a series of demands. So Cees takes the opportunity to seek the wisdom of the trident-wielding deity, and to offer the god updates about his own life and thoughts. At once playful and poignant, beautiful and at times slightly bizarre, this masterful exploration of humankind's relationship with the sea uses the minutiae of everyday life to illuminate the broadest questions of human existence, all couched in the lapidary prose of one of Europe's outstanding stylists.
The winner of numerous literary awards including the Anne Frank Prize and Goethe Prize, Cees Nooteboom, novelist, poet and journalist, "is a careful prose stylist of a notably philosophical bent." (J.M. Coetzee, The New York Review of Books) In Roads to Berlin, Nooteboom's reportage, "from a 1963 Khrushchev rally in East Berlin to the tearing down of the Palast der Republik, brilliantly captures the intensity of the capital and its â??associated layers of memory,'" The Economist said. The book maps the changing landscape of post-World-War-II Germany, from the period before the fall of the Berlin Wall to the present. Written and updated over the course of several decades, an eyewitness account of the pivotal events of 1989 gives way to a perceptive appreciation of its difficult passage to reunification. Nooteboom's writings on politics, people, architecture, and culture are as digressive as they are eloquent; his innate curiosity takes him through the landscapes of Heine and Goethe, steeped in Romanticism and mythology, and to Germany's baroque cities. With an outsider's objectivity he has crafted an intimate portrait of the country to its present day. From the Hardcover edition.
From “one of the greatest modern novelists” comes a haunting tale of angels, art, and modern love (A. S. Byatt). In Lost Paradise, Cees Nooteboom sets out to connect two seemingly unrelated strangers whom he has glimpsed on his travels, and to explore the major impact that small interactions can have on the course of our journeys. A beautiful woman aboard a Berlin-bound flight becomes Alma, a young lady who leaves her parents’ São Paulo home on a hot summer night in a fit of depression. Her car engine dies in one of the city’s most dangerous favelas, a mob surrounds her, and she is pulled from the automobile. To escape her memory of the assault, she flees across the world, to Australia, where she becomes involved in the beautiful but bizarre Angel Project. Not long after, Dutch literary critic Erik Zontag is in Perth, Australia, for a conference. He has found a winged woman curled up in a closet in an empty house. He reaches out, and for a second allows his fingertips to brush her feathers—and then she speaks. The intersection of their paths illuminates the extraordinary coincidences that propel our lives. “Dreamy and self-conscious . . . [Nooteboom] brazenly explores notions of reinvention, healing, loss, and the divine.” —Tom Barbash, The New York Times Book Review
Set in the cities and islands of the Mediterranean, and linked thematically, the eight stories in The Foxes Come at Night read more like a novel, a meditation on memory, life and death. Their protagonists collect and reconstruct fragments of lives lived intensely, and now lost, crystallized in memory or in the detail of a photograph. And yet the tone of these stories is far from pessimistic: it seems that death is nothing to be afraid of.
Roads to Santiago is an evocative travelogue through the sights, sounds, and smells of a little known Spain-its architecture, art, history, landscapes, villages, and people. And as much as it is the story of his travels, it is an elegant and detailed chronicle of Cees Nooteboom's thirty-five-year love affair with his adopted second country. He presents a world not visible to the casual tourist, by invoking the great spirits of Spain's past-El Cid, Cervantes, Alfonso the Chaste and Alfonso the Wise, the ill-fated Hapsburgs, and Velázquez. Be it a discussion of his trip to the magnificent Prado Museum or his visit to the shrine of the Black Madonna of Guadalupe, Nooteboom writes with the depth and intelligence of an historian, the bravado of an adventurer, and the passion of a poet. Reminiscent of Robert Hughes's Barcelona, Roads to Santiago is the consummate portrait of Spain for all readers.
In Rituals, Amsterdam of the fifties, sixties and seventies is viewed from the perspective of the capricious Inni Wintrop. An unintentional suicide survivor, the unexpected gift of life returned lends him the curiousity, and impartiality, to survey others' lives and rountines. Inni's opposite, the one-eyed downhill skier Arnold Taads measures his life by the clock, while his disowned son Philip follows Japanese rituals which themselves seem to render his existence meaningless. A novel for those who seek to unravel our mysterious, apparently directionless lives...
Since making his first voyage as a sailor-to earn his passage from his native Holland to South America -- Cees Nooteboom has been captivated by foreign countries and cultures and has never stopped travelling. This collection of his most enjoyable travel pieces ranges far and wide, informed throughout by the author's humanity and gentle humour. From exotic locales such as Isfahan, the Gambia and Mali to more familiar places such as Australia and Zurich, Nooteboom reveals the world as he lives it, showing us the strangeness in places we thought we knew and the familiarity of places most of us will never visit. His phenomenal gifts as an observer and travel the wealth of his reading and learning make him a delightful companion. Nomad's Hotel features an introduction from fellow world-class traveller and writer extraordinaire Alberto Manguel.
Was auf den Raisen Cees Nootebooms geschieht und was er notierend festhält, ist : Blick in die Welt, auf Geschichten, Bilder und Natur, auf Menschen : sie finden im Kosmos eines einzigartigen Beobachters Platz.
The best new writing, photography, art, and reportage from and about Berlin—in the series that’s “like a literary vacation” (Publishers Weekly). In 1990s Berlin, the scars of a century of war were still visible everywhere: coal stoves, crumbling buildings, desolate minimarts, not a working buzzer or elevator. To visit the city then was a hallucinatory experience, a simultaneous journey into the past and into the future. The abandoned ruins, the hidden gems found at the flea market, the illegal basement raves are a thing of the past. The era of Berlin as a site of urban archeology is over. Almost all the damaged buildings have been repaired, squatters have been removed, the shops selling East German furniture have closed down. Without its wounds, the landscape of the city is perhaps less striking but more solid, stronger. Even the city’s inhabitants have lost some of their melancholia, their romantic and self-destructive streak: today you can even find people who come to Berlin to actually work, not just to “create” or idle their days away. Yet, Berlin remains a youthful city and retains its aura as “the capital of cool.” Its only sacrosanct principles are an uncompromising multiculturalism and the belief that its future is yet to be written. This volume of the series includes: The Greatest Show in Town: The Resurrection of Potsdamer Platz by Peter Schneider · Berlin Suite by Cees Nooteboom · Tempelhof: A Field of Dreams by Vincenzo Latronico · Plus: the controversial reconstruction of a Prussian castle, Berlin’s most transgressive sex club and its disappearing traditional pubs, a green urban oasis, suburban neo-Nazis, North Vietnamese in the East, South Vietnamese in the West, techno everywhere and much more . . . “These books are so rich and engrossing that it is rewarding to read them even when one is stuck at home.” —The Times Literary Supplement
Este es un libro dedicado a los viajeros, a quienes entienden el viaje no como una huida sino como un modo de conocerse a si mismo; a quienes creen que a viajar se aprende, como se aprende a leer, a amar, a morir. El destino, o los recursos que cada uno tiene para alcanzarlo, no es lo importante; lo que cuenta es la disposicion, la mirada de aproximacion al otro, al mundo que esta fuera de nosotros, da igual su proximidad o su lejania. En este libro Cees Nooteboom nos lleva a conocer su condicion de nomada, en una serie de viajes a traves del tiempo por Gambia, Mali, el Sahara, Bolivia y Mexico. B+Sigo construyendo mi hotel, ese inexistente edificio que solo existe en mi cabeza, el hotel del mundo proximo y lejano, de la ciudad y del silencio, del frio y del calor.B; Nomadas somos todos porque el origen de la existencia es el movimiento: por eso el viaje es una experiencia que no tiene fin. Solo tenemos que aprender a no temerla.
Over de hoofden keek ik naar je gezicht, de begerige trek. En ik was niet de enige, de baron, Gilles, Nigel, zelfs Tico en het wonderkind. En de vrouwen keken hoe de mannen keken. Veren overeind, nagels gescherpt. Het heeft een tijd geduurd eer je die er ook onder had. Nee, dat zeg ik niet goed. Eer ze van je hielden, zoals wij.' In het spiegelende dubbelverhaal Paula + Paula II wordt een herinnering opgehaald. Een man bekijkt een foto, en ziet het verleden en de vrouw die daarin aanwezig was, weer voor zich. In het tweede verhaal kijkt de vrouw terug, geeft ze antwoord vanuit een plaats waar alleen herinnering nog tastbaar is.
Wat ooit begon met Saigoku, een boek over pelgrimstochten in Japan, werd voor Cees Nooteboom gaandeweg een diepe fascinatie die hem steeds opnieuw zou doen terugkeren naar het keizerrijk. Als onvermoeibare reiziger kijkt hij altijd achter de volgende heuvel, uit nieuwsgierigheid naar een Japan dat hij nog niet kent en begrijpt. Hij voelt een sensueel genot in de mensenmenigtes van Tokio, valt in de snelste trein ter wereld tussen de zingende monniken langzaam in slaap, probeert de verschillende tempels uit elkaar te houden en ziet in dat hij daar nog een volgend leven voor nodig zal hebben. In Japan komen deze reisverhalen voor het eerst samen. Met zijn vermogen om de fijnere nuances van het land te begrijpen, richt Cees Nooteboom een persoonlijk monument op voor de kunst, landschappen en inwoners.
Rembrandt-Velázquez: Dutch and Spanish Masters' presents the best work of two seventeenth-century master painters from the Netherlands and Spain. Works by Rembrandt and Velázquez are presented in a context of contemporaries and compatriots, including spectacular works by Zurbarán, Vermeer, Murillo, Hals, Valdés Leal, Torrentius, Ribera and others. 'Rembrandt-Velázquez' focuses on themes such as religion and realism, beauty and emotion. Presented in pairs, the Spanish and Dutch masterpieces enter into a dialogue. In his essay Hans den Hartog Jager looks for the differences and similarities between two of the greatest painters of all time - and arrives at an unexpected conclusion. Cees Nooteboom takes the reader back to his memories of Spain and reflects on the history and art of the country he calls his second homeland. Exhibition: Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam, The Netherlands (11.10.2019-19.02.2020).
Thank you for visiting our website. Would you like to provide feedback on how we could improve your experience?
This site does not use any third party cookies with one exception — it uses cookies from Google to deliver its services and to analyze traffic.Learn More.