In the opening essay of this subtle collection of his shorter travel writing in translation from Dutch, Nooteboom tries to answer the question asked over and over by his friends - why has he spent over 50 years of his life traveling? Known both for his novels and over a dozen volumes chronicling his travels, including several full-length accounts of journeys, readers of both will not be surprised at part of the answer: he travels in order to gain ideas for his writing, especially his fiction. Incidents, motifs, and even people from his travel writing show up repeatedly in his fiction. Yet this explanation only goes half-way in explaining Nooteboom’s need to be elsewhere. For as he explains multiple times over the course of the 14 essays contained in this book, only in travel is he able to achieve the “silence” necessary to be able to write, a detachment from the world he is unable to achieve by remaining stationary, as a part of a world.
Regardless of his motivations, the end result is more often than not a wonderful reading experience. Nooteboom’s prose is often quite lyrical, as evidenced by such pieces as his visit to Zurich or the Isle of Aran. In many of the essays, the idea of movement is vividly apparent (not always a fact in travel writing, which often comes across as a tiring list of point A to point B to point C, ad nausea), chiefly due to the author’s constant need to move in new ways - to travel at odd angles, as it were. In Mantua, he leaves the city at once so that he can experience it walking in from the countryside. On Aran, he seeks out an author who life’s work has been to chronicle every plant, animal, person, and kind of rock on the sparse isle in order to understand how such a barren place could evoke an infinitely complex and brilliant personal geography. Finally, in two of the longer pieces, Nooteboom travels apparently at random from person to person met in Gambia and Mali, letting their associations lead him physically deeper into the countryside, and intellectually farther toward an understanding of cultures far outside the realm of his prior experience.
Regardless of his motivations, the end result is more often than not a wonderful reading experience. Nooteboom’s prose is often quite lyrical, as evidenced by such pieces as his visit to Zurich or the Isle of Aran. In many of the essays, the idea of movement is vividly apparent (not always a fact in travel writing, which often comes across as a tiring list of point A to point B to point C, ad nausea), chiefly due to the author’s constant need to move in new ways - to travel at odd angles, as it were. In Mantua, he leaves the city at once so that he can experience it walking in from the countryside. On Aran, he seeks out an author who life’s work has been to chronicle every plant, animal, person, and kind of rock on the sparse isle in order to understand how such a barren place could evoke an infinitely complex and brilliant personal geography. Finally, in two of the longer pieces, Nooteboom travels apparently at random from person to person met in Gambia and Mali, letting their associations lead him physically deeper into the countryside, and intellectually farther toward an understanding of cultures far outside the realm of his prior experience.
Occasionally the writing becomes somewhat too concerned with meta-travel, and being a writer primarily concerned with the literary history of many of the places he visits, Nooteboom has the tendency to wander off in a meandering tangent of words. He always comes back to the here and now, though, and the more essays one reads in this book, the more one appreciates their compact structures as intricate and jewel-like miniatures of single places in time. Not gaudy jewels, but tasteful and multifaceted, enduring like small treasures in the mind long after the last step has been taken, the last word read. A few instances of explicit language and descriptions of violence from distant history
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