533

Nooteboom, Cees

£9.99

533 days in the life of a great European writer. Though a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to the island of Menorca, ‘the island of the wind’, and it is in his house there, with a study full of books and a garden taken over with native plants and fauna, that the 533 days of writing take place. The product is not a diary, nor a set of movements of the soul organised by dates, but ‘a book of days’ to retain ‘something of the flow of thoughts, and of what one reads and sees’ with concerns about his cactus garden and suffering hibiscus, his love for Menorca, his thoughts on the world and on the place we humans have in the universe.

Out of stock

Publish Date: 13/10/2022
ISBN: 9781529402599 Category: Tag:

Description

“A lyrical ‘book of days’ . . . A bejewelled mosaic” Financial Times

“Humane, insightful and deeply cultured” Times Literary Supplement

Though a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to Menorca, “the island of the wind”, and it is in his house there, with a study full of books and a garden taken over by cacti and many insects, that the 533 days of writing take place.

The result is not a diary, nor a set of movements of the soul organised by dates, but “a book of days”, with observations about what is immediately around him, his love for Menorca, his thoughts on the world, on life and death, on literature and oblivion. Every impression opens windows onto vast horizons: the Divine Comedy and the books it generated, the contempt of Borges for Gombrowicz, the death of David Bowie, the endless flight of the Voyagers, the repetition of history as a tragedy, but never as farce.

533 is a meditative rhapsody that would like to exclude the noise of current events, yet must return to them several times, and sceptically contemplates the threat of a disintegrating Europe. Reading this book is like having an extraordinary conversation with an extraordinary mind.

“The very first pages are so powerful that you suspect the author must have binned the preceding pages that were needed to climb to such heights” De Volkskrant

“The 533 days captivate in their undisguised openness to the world” Süddeutsche Zeitung

Photographs by Simone Sassen * Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson

Additional information

Weight 160 g
Dimensions 196 × 126 × 22 mm
Author

Publisher

Imprint

Cover

Paperback

Pages

240

Language

English

Edition
Dewey

839.31364 (edition:23)

Readership

General – Trade / Code: K