ALL SOULS’ DAY

Name: ALL SOULS’ DAY
Author: Cees Nooteboom
ISBN: 0-15-100566-4

by Cees Nooteboom & translated by Susan Massotty ‧ RELEASE DATE: Nov. 1, 2001

All Souls’ Day displays with admirable lucidity the workings of a humane, civilized, and consistently interesting mind. But...

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A documentary filmmaker’s tenuous hold on both reality and the past occupies the foreground of this very discursive 1998 novel by the prizewinning Dutch author (The Following Story, 1994, etc.).

On All Souls’ Day, November 2nd, prayers are offered on behalf of those who dwell in Purgatory. This practice neatly symbolizes the condition of 45-year-old Arthur Daane, who is mourning the deaths of his wife and son in a plane crash, and relocates to Berlin (after reunification)—reasoning that a place that has its own painful history to deal with is where he may as well be. There’s very little more in the way of action or incident here than this, as Nooteboom fills the story with Daane’s meditations on photography, history, art, the ideas of eminent philosophers (he has made a film about Nietzsche, and considers Walter Benjamin as a subject), and other matters: generally, the filmmaker’s (and the writer’s) vain efforts to capture and “stop” time, thus preventing it from elapsing. There are also numerous conversations with fellow émigrés and friends, including sculptor-writer Victor Leven (eternally haunted by the memory of WWII), “philosopher-turned-lunatic” Arthur Tieck (who has appeared in Daane films), and—back home in The Netherlands—Daane’s platonic confidante Erna, who isn’t much more than a device to help keep the talk flowing. When Daane meets lissome history student Elik Olanje, and follows her to Spain, dramatic things begin happening—too late, alas, to vitiate the reader’s conviction that he has been subject to an intolerably overextended harangue.

All Souls’ Day displays with admirable lucidity the workings of a humane, civilized, and consistently interesting mind. But it’s just barely a novel, and few readers are likely to stay its tortuous and redundant course.

Pub Date: Nov. 1, 2001

ISBN: 0-15-100566-4

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Harcourt

Review Posted Online: June 24, 2010

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 2001

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

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NOMAD’S HOTEL
by Cees Nooteboom and translated by Ann Kelland

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LOST PARADISE
by Cees Nooteboom & translated by Susan Massotty

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THE FOLLOWING STORY
by Cees Nooteboom

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THINGS FALL APART

by Chinua Achebe ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 23, 1958

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

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Written with quiet dignity that builds to a climax of tragic force, this book about the dissolution of an African tribe, its traditions, and values, represents a welcome departure from the familiar "Me, white brother" genre.

Written by a Nigerian African trained in missionary schools, this novel tells quietly the story of a brave man, Okonkwo, whose life has absolute validity in terms of his culture, and who exercises his prerogative as a warrior, father, and husband with unflinching single mindedness. But into the complex Nigerian village filters the teachings of strangers, teachings so alien to the tribe, that resistance is impossible. One must distinguish a force to be able to oppose it, and to most, the talk of Christian salvation is no more than the babbling of incoherent children. Still, with his guns and persistence, the white man, amoeba-like, gradually absorbs the native culture and in despair, Okonkwo, unable to withstand the corrosion of what he, alone, understands to be the life force of his people, hangs himself. In the formlessness of the dying culture, it is the missionary who takes note of the event, reminding himself to give Okonkwo's gesture a line or two in his work, The Pacification of the Primitive Tribes of the Lower Niger.

This book sings with the terrible silence of dead civilizations in which once there was valor.

Pub Date: Jan. 23, 1958

ISBN: 0385474547

Page Count: 207

Publisher: McDowell, Obolensky

Review Posted Online: April 23, 2013

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1958

Categories:

LITERARY FICTION

- BOOK REVIEW
THERE WAS A COUNTRY
by Chinua Achebe

- BOOK REVIEW
THE EDUCATION OF A BRITISH-PROTECTED CHILD
by Chinua Achebe

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HOME AND EXILE
by Chinua Achebe

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THE SECRET HISTORY

by Donna Tartt ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 16, 1992

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The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.