Customer Reviews

All Souls Day

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I just finished reading this book and cannot recommend it enough. It is a sort of novel of ideas that encompasses traditional German philosophy as well as more modern issues. The story and characters are strong, and the portrayal of Berlin as an historical but ever-changing city is dead-on. This novel is longer than most of Nooteboom's others, but just as good a starting place if you're unfamiliar with his books.

Arthur Daane is a documentary maker, a camera operator, and a lonely man. His wife and child, who died years earlier, haunt his waking life. He has a solid group of friends, a rag-tag trio of intellectuals who do their best to keep up his spirits, but as with all people suffering from the demons associated with the death of loved ones, their best can never be enough. So, he travels about Europe, working for commission when he needs the money, spending time on his personal project when he does not. He walks, he thinks, he remembers.

Soon, however, a new presence enters Arthur's life. She is Elik, a young Ph.D. student studying an obscure twelfth century Spanish queen. He is attracted to her mystery, she is attracted to his silence. A romance begins, one that is confusing to them both.

And that, in a nutshell, is the entire novel. Nooteboom writes at a leisurely pace, allowing Arthur to ponder all manner of philosophical and cultural problems. A walk for Arthur is not merely a walk - it is nearly an essay, with statues inspiring history, trees inspiring philosophy, dogs inspiring memory. Generally, Arthur's thought connections are interesting and relevant however, they often seem more padding than anything else.

The first hundred or so pages of the novel occupy themselves with Arthur's journey around Berlin, his current residence. While he walks, he remembers snippets of conversation with his friends Victor, Arno and Zenobia, these isolated items of character-building a prelude to a meeting at their favourite restaurant. Unfortunately, his three closest friends - the absent Erna notwithstanding - function more as mouthpieces for Nooteboom, rather than as characters in their own right. Conversations, when the occur, are punctuated with random facts that serve to link topics together, allowing the author to dazzle us with his varied and wide-ranging intellect. This is fine, except that Arthur's friends never progress beyond this fact-serving. They are stilted, because all they can be are repositories of knowledge. We are left to wonder why Arthur wants to be around them, and why they would want to be around him. A fine example comes from an early conversation between Arno and Victor:

'How on earth can you people call it cheese?'

'Luther, Hildegard von Bingen, Jakob Bohme, Novalis, and Heidegger have all eaten this cheese,' Arno said. 'The penetrating ordor that you smell is the German version of eternity. And the translucent substance that you see, with the dull sheen of candle wax, might very well represent the mystical heart of my beloved Vaterland.'

All very fine, but their conversations never progress beyond this babble of knowledge swapping. Are we expected to believe that there are people who talk like this? And if they have been eating at the same restaurant for years, surely Arno would not lambast the table with this nugget of information upon arriving at the cheese dish? It all smacks of a writer writing the scene, rather than people living in it. A shame, considering Nooteboom's obvious intelligence.

When the femme fatale, Elik, enters the story, the novel shifts focus. At first, we are led to believe that the plot will follow the ordinary, 'mysterious alluring woman' cliche, but it does not. No, almost immediately after Elik is introduced, we are allowed into her mind through a point-of-view section, and this dispels a large amount of her artificial mystery. A lesser novel would collapse once the shroud of the female has lifted, but if anything, All Souls' Day thrives. Elik and Arthur are dancers performing to a song they can't hear, with movements they don't know. We are led to believe that as confusing Arthur finds Elik, so to is Elik baffled by Arthur.

A large focus of the novel is the way history portrays us, and how we portray it. Elik immerses herself in a period of history that is so small, and so focused, that it is difficult for others to appreciate the reason for studying it in such detail. But isn't our own small slice of history just as irrelevant, ultimately? What claim can we have on the future, one hundred years from now, let alone a thousand? Coupled with these intriguing ideas comes the question of German guilt following World War II. Clearly, Berlin is a land steeped in history - some of it good, some of it not. Can we look at Hitler and the Holocaust as merely history? Nooteboom argues through his characters that we cannot, yet surely in a thousand years, that is exactly what scholars will be doing. How can we expect the future to be as affected as we are, on an event that to them, will have infinitely less relevance and impact? An unsettling idea, but one that is virtually unavoidable once presented.

There is beauty. A scene where Elik dances in an underground rave club, is moving in its horror. His description is note perfect, and shows clearly how someone away from that scene might interpret the clashing music: 'She seemed to know them, to assume a different voice, a kind of shout to be heard above the music, heavy metal, the sound of a factory producing nothing but noise, pounding figures on a dance floor, slave laborers working on an absent product, contorted bodies moving in time to a merciless beat, writhing with every lash of the whip, screaming along with what they seemed to recognise as words, a German chorus from Hell, raw voices scraped over jagged iron, poisonous metal.' This is, to my mind, a compelling interpretation of a chaotic scene. Other descriptions throughout are equally impressive, showing that when Nooteboom shifts out of pedagogic mode, he is more than capable of producing narrative gold.

Elik is an unsettling character. No, it is more than that - she is unpleasant. Even when we are allowed into her mind, it is difficult to sympathise. Yes, we appreciate her quest to learn all there is to know about Queen Urraca, but can we also appreciate her alternately hostile and baffling treatment of Arthur? We can't, and the novel suffers. We also cannot easily sympathise with Arthur's growing obsession, because of Nooteboom's intellectual distancing act. Because conversations as well as thoughts are so filled with information and philosophising that while interesting, adds little to the characters and indeed detracts from them, we just can't care enough about who is doing what and why.

This novel develops in a much slower, traditional way than Nooteboom's other novels but this slowness is appropriate for the subject matter. The strength of this novel is the incredible way Nooteboom through words, allows us to see the world as Arthur sees it - he processes visual images not words or logical formulations. We are drawn into his experience of verbal overload, of stumbling to say in words what is known in visual or aural images.

The second success of the novel is it's accurate portrayal of a specific intellectual time - Hegel, Camus, Volans, Pedereski, Hildegard ... it was so familar as to be eerie ... for the novel Berlin with Dutch, German, Russian individuals. And yet in some strange way the same as my college days in rural Wisconsin with students from Uganda, Honduras ... In some way Nooteboom has captured the intellectual life of an era and successfully made it universal.

Throughout the novel - verbally and by plot - the volume addresses the issue of history - personal, recent, and ancient. The juxtaposition of Arthur's visual record of history, of his friend's intellectual understanding and of his "girl friend's" archival search for history is effective at forcing the reader to think. Often this is done by small details - a statue that fallen still has a cap in place where a real cap would have fallen off, the timeless sound of conches in Japanese monasteries, the sound of tires on wet pavement ...

This is a novel that challenges the way you perceive the world rather than simply presenting the challenge that Arthur is facing. Arthur having lost wife and child in an airplane accident is forced to reevaluate his world. The novel says the rest of us should do so without a prod like Arthur's.