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the complete review - fiction

Lost Paradise

by
Cees Nooteboom

general information | review summaries | our review | links | about the author

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Our Assessment:

A- : pleasing, far-flung gossamer tale

See our review for fuller assessment.

  From the Reviews:

• "Aber obwohl der Kern des Buchs nicht eben originell ist, bringt es einer von den alten Herrschaften der Literatur immerhin fertig, einen Roman zu schreiben, den man mit Neugier und Spannung zu Ende liest. "A good read", wie man in Australien sagen würde." - Gerhard Schulz, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung
  
  
• "Calling a novel Lost Paradise invites a daunting comparison, but Cees Nooteboom has the reputation and the chutzpah to lay down a few gauntlets of this sort.(…) Appearing as a character at the end of the novel, Nooteboom presents the completed work as his own lost paradise, validating his self-aggrandisement and adding an extra facet to an intriguing conceit." - Alyssa McDonald, New Statesman
  
  
• "Through his fable Nooteboom may well be suggesting that the hunger of the soul does not require direct experience of the transcendent to be satisfied, that complicity in an aesthetic illusion can take the soul surprisingly far. (...) As if to remedy the thinness of the stories of Erik and Alma, Nooteboom embeds them between a substantial prologue and epilogue in which his elegant, subtle intelligence finds more room to flex its wings. (...) Susan Massotty's translation of Lost Paradise reads fluently. Some of that fluency comes, however, at the cost of precision." - J.M.Coetzee, The New York Review of Books
  
  
• "Nooteboom (...) uses earthbound notions of hell and paradise, a few lines from Milton and an angel or two to construct a story of two people who meet at a literary festival in Perth, then again years later across a massage table at a mountain spa. Along the way, he brazenly explores notions of reinvention, healing, loss and the divine." - Tom Barbash, The New York Times Book Review
  
  
• "Nooteboom's characters are gripping, his dialogue humorous and his narrative brimming with musings about identity and redemption. His genius, however, is his seamless integration of contemporary, mythic and historic images." - Jennifer Vanderbes, The Washington Post
  
  
• "Nooteboom tupft mit diesen Zitaten ebenso wie mit ein paar anderen noch ein paar Glanzlichter auf die Flügel seiner Engel, und er weiß, wie man das macht. Vielleicht wird man das alles nicht über Jahre im Kopf bewahren, aber das Bild vom Engel Alma, der in Perth in Australien in einem Schrank mit dem Gesicht zur Wand liegt und darauf wartet, entdeckt zu werden, das wird man nicht vergessen." - Jochen Jung, Die Zeit

Please note that these ratings solely represent the complete review's biased interpretation and subjective opinion of the actual reviews and do not claim to accurately reflect or represent the views of the reviewers. Similarly the illustrative quotes chosen here are merely those the complete review subjectively believes represent the tenor and judgment of the review as a whole. We acknowledge (and remind and warn you) that they may, in fact, be entirely unrepresentative of the actual reviews by any other measure.

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The complete review's Review:

       There are two main characters in Lost Paradise: Dutch literary critic Erik Zondag and the young Brazilian woman Alma. Nooteboom intersects their very separate lives in an unusual and feathery-light (at least on some levels) novel of fate and paradise. And angels.
       Alma and her friend Almut leave Brazil after Alma drives her car, as if in a daze, into a very bad neighbourhood and quickly finds herself -- as she chose to falsify it for herself -- "enveloped by a black cloud", everything stripped from her: "They had not bothered to kill her, but had simply left her behind as if she were rubbish." The more adventurous and orderly Almut is an appropriate companion to then head out into the world with. They take a course in physical therapy massage so they'll have a skill that is marketable everywhere and don't have to fall back on waitressing and the like. They head to Australia, where Alma looks for some escape in the dreamtime world of the aborigines; later Alma also winds up in Austria.
       Zondag, meanwhile, is a fairly dissatisfied writer, stuck the past "twenty years in the rarefied atmosphere of the literary supplement". He's not so much an author as a part of the literary "clean-up crew", who had gotten his permanent position at his newspaper by making: "quite a name for himself by taking potshots at a few literary giants" . Indeed, there's quite a bit of criticism of the Dutch literary establishment in the novel -- including a swipe at the old grandees of Dutch literature, that Nooteboom-fellow among them ..... Zondag doesn't like what's become of the literary world -- "Literature had become a career" is one of his complaints -- and then:

All that mediocrity week after week seemed to cling to his hair and creep under his nails.

     It's this book, a book out of which she is about to disappear, along with me.

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Links:

• Vintage publicity page
• Grove/Atlantic publicity page
• Suhrkamp publicity page
• Information at the Dutch Foundation for Literature
• Excerpt
• Interview at Deutschlandfunk (German)

• Baltimore City Paper
• Club des rats de biblio (French)
• Deutschlandradio (German)
• The First Post
• Friesch Dagblad (Dutch)
• La Lettrine (French)
• Lire (French)
• Literair Nederland (Dutch)
• literaturkritik.de (German)
• Het Parool (Dutch)
• taz (German)
• Textem (German)
• Trouw (Dutch)
• de Volkskrant (Dutch)
• The Washington Post
• Die Zeit (German)

• Official site
• The complete review's Cees Nooteboom page
• Cees Nooteboom at books and writers