533 A Book of Days by Cees Nooteboom

533 A Book of Days by Cees Nooteboom

Dutch Non-Fiction

Original title – 533: een dagenboek

Translator – Laura Watkinson

Source – Personal copy

I featured an Interview with Cees many years ago on the blog. I haven’t had many interviews recently, and I love getting insight from a writer. This is the fifth book from Cees I will have reviewed. He is one of those great writers that can write across various styles of writing poetry, fiction, and travel writing, and this is something of a memoir of his life and those books he has consumed over the years and the writers he has known all and a love of literature that shines through this book. This is a book compiled over years of his summer vacations in Menorca. Another of the books I read by him was his lament every year when he had to move. This is him in the summer mulling over memories of his years of writing and the writers he has encountered. He is. writer that should have won the Nobel by now one of the great voices of his nation.

Literary politics (such a thing exists: hegemonies, influences, triumvirates, legacies) and death. Elias Canetti (“The Prophet Elias [Elijah] defeated the Angel of Death. My name is becoming increasingly uncanny to me.”) on Thomas Bernhard. He claims him for himself but is afraid he will have to surrender him to Beckett. “I elevate him to my student and of course he is that, in a much deeper sense than Iris Murdoch his former lover], who changes everything into pleasantness and light and has essentially become a clever and engaging entertainment writer. For that reason alone, she cannot be a real student of mine, because she is obsessed with sexuality. Bernhard, on the other hand, is, like me, obsessed with death. Recently, how-ever, he has been under the influence of a man who puts my own in the shade, namely Beckett. Bernhard’s hypochondria

I love his thoughts on Bernhard !!

The book comprises several Vignettes that see Cees looking back on his life or, over time, talking about the catus in his garden that all have names. So he recounts things like Canetti’s death and how Thomas Bernhard was obsessed with death . Then we see how a walk on the Island connects him to god as he did it. This is a book that collects his thoughts a lot about plant and how Yucca leaves looks like Daggers. Then we have pieces around the night sky. Thoughts around Finnegans wake ( a book that I have yet to tackle and always love people’s view of it ) He then has a section around Hungarian writers which mentions Count Banffy, who I have read the first part of his trilogy. Then Peter Esterhazy and his epic novel Celestial Harmonies, a book that has been unread on my own shelf for far too long. In a later piece, he mentions Miklos Szentkuthy, another writer who has been on my radar for too long. Witold Gombrowicz is a writer who has a lot to say about as well as so many of the writers that were and are around as he has been a writer. This is one of the significant figures of European literature writing every summer over his many years in his villa in Menorca.

 

As I write on, Gould, in 1981, plays sonata number 42 as an illustration of Szentkuthy’s proposition: the difference between that sonata and my cactus is the difference between the classical-rational structure of a “work” on the one hand, and biological forms (my cactus – as I am writing this, I see him before me as though I were looking into my garden in Spain) on the other. “My own writings for the time being,” says Miklos Szentkuthy, “belong to the cactus category: if I can have a role in literature it is the direct tangibility of biological lines and forms of instinct in my sentences. ‘Experimental novel’ was said about Prae in more than one place, by which one was supposed to understand an anachronistic relic of the old-fashioned mood of the roth century.” Prae, in spite of the huge reputation that the book has in Hungary, has been translated into few other languages, which prompts both suspicion and curiosity.

Prae is one of those books I must read at some point !!

I am a massive fan of Cees. I should read him more often, but he is a writer I want to have books left from, but in this book, he reminds me as a reader of those books still out there to discover and made me think of how underread I am in some areas of my reading. I love books like this, a glimpse into a great writer’s mind and workings and musing. He does mention writers’ diaries in passing; at times, this isn’t a diary but more a collection of moments and thoughts caught over time, a lifetime from those early days of his as a writer, his debut novel, which I have yet to read. I also love the talk of his planets and his garden as someone who isn’t a gardener but hopes to get some great plants in my new garden (well, when my rear lawn is laid ). This is hard to pigeonhole as it covers so many different subjects it just needs to be read !! Have ypu read any books by Cees ?

Winston’s score +A – I love a book that spurs me on as a reader to read more and discover more !!