Reason read: botm/May 2024Slow moving novel set in Germany with trips to Estonia, Japan and Spain, and even Netherlands by Dutch author Cees Nooteboom. I enjoyed the main characters friends, I found the love interest girl to be way too intense and the ending is a bit sad but I applaud Arthur's decision to go east and not west.

quotes:
pg 60, "The past doesn't have any atoms" Arno said. "and every monument is a falsification. Rather than reminding us of someone's presence. the names on those monuments only serve to reinforce their absence. The message is always that we're expendable, and that's a paradox of monuments, since they claim to do the opposite. Names get in the way of actual truth. It would be better if we didn't have them."

pg 70 "they can hardly wait until the whole world is eating the same food. And not just the same food. It's a package deal--eat the same, hear the same, see the same, and the, of course, think the same.

pg 119, "they don't understand, they don't know where to start. You can't make one country out of two." "Sell us your factories, we can do it better".

pg 123, "every city is a voiceful city".

126. "shoes better at expressing humiliation than any other article of clothing."

Pg131 "If there was such a thing as betrayal it would have to be survival itself--the unseemly actions of the living, beginning the moment they turned away from the grave and walked off."

pg 228 "Your ability to exist in time is limited, your ability to think in time is boundless". ( )

What an amazing book. I'm not sure how to describe so I'm not really going to try. Challenging yet unputdownable. A must read. ( )

Arthur Daane's preoccupation with capturing ordinary life on film is mirrorred in the author's presentation of his protagonist's life. Readers are taken on a journey of observation where the normal routines of Daane's life are explored, fixating on dinners with friends, ruminations on his film project, and momentary journeys out of country for work as a cameraman. Daan's life momentarily spikes in action when he meets the enigmatic (if strange) Elik, a woman who treats his as an object of her own use and who eventually abandons him. Their strange relationship is seen as the centrepoint of the novel, but it inevitably fades into the monotony of ordinary life's occurances as Daane returns to Berlin after her rejection and resumes his normal occupations. ( )

There are many books that I read in the course of the year and enjoy, some that I enjoy immensely. These books I close with a sigh and indulge in a bit of reflection. Their contents pop up in my thoughts frequently over the next few days - after that, less frequently, but still occasionally stopping by.

All Souls Day is not one of those books. All Souls Day is a book which for me finished rather undramatically. There was no moment of reflection. There was an awareness, rather, that the journey it had taken me on had been a journey of moments, becoming clear in intent only towards the end.

I also knew that I had no need to reflect briefly, because the words, the story, the characters, the images and the ideas had become embedded in me. No need to have a gentle goodbye. This is a book that will continue on with me. A book that will be one of that rather tiny collection which I will read repeatedly because although they are embedded in me, there is often a need for a reminder, a need to take the journey again.

All Souls Day is a book that travels like life itself. As I read along, I felt no desire or need for plot - something of a plot emerged gradually, but the captivating part was the flow of the book itself. I could not stop reading it just as I cannot stop walking through my own life. And yet at times I read it gradually, as if afraid to go too fast, afraid to bring it to a close. Beautiful and full, All Souls Day captures the magic of the everyday - its accomplishment is the same thing that its main character strives to do in his bits of film, the ones he rarely shows any one but keeps for itself.

There is so much more that is in this book and I know that each further reading will be just as rich as the first, perhaps even more so. There are explorations of city, of culture and character, and of history and its impact on all of these. The connections among all the different themes becoming clearer as the book progresses, but there is never a lecture or a final conclusion imposed on the reader. The final thought offered is gentle and allows the readers to do with it what they please. ( )

"Conversations consist for the most part of things one does not say."

Arthur Daane is a Dutch documentary-maker and free-lance cameraman who recently lost his wife and son in a plane crash. Unable to face living in Holland he lives in Berlin where, when he's not off on assignments, he spends his free time filming the mundane elements of everyday day life. A project that no one will ever see.

His best friends in Berlin are a philosopher, a sculptor and a physicist whom he meets regularly for meals where they discuss music, art and semantics of language. Now whilst his friends fairly burst with philosophical energy Arthur is only a peripheral figure to these conversations. So when Arthur meets Elik, a history student, he is immediately drawn to her because she is so different from his friends. She pops over for sex whenever the mood takes her and leaves again in silence immediately afterwards and refuses to reveal anything about herself. Arthur seems to see his own salvation in this mysterious woman and, in search for her, follows her to Spain.

Now it's obvious that Nooteboom is fairly knowledgeable about art and semantics and has an interest in the effects of German reunification had on its populace but if he trying to portray one man's difficult journey from under the dark clouds of grief into the bright light of restoration- then he failed. Too often it felt like I was being lectured to. At no time did I feel any particular empathy towards Arthur, in fact the tragic loss that he suffered seemed almost trivial. Likewise, whilst Elik obviously had her own personal demons I felt that she came across little better than a stroppy, self-absorbed teenager. Despair and sorrow, art and intellectual snobbery seem to be rather strange bed fellows.

Coincidentally I recently finished reading Paul Auster's ' The Book of Illusions' in which, as with this novel, the central character had recently lost in his family in an aeroplane crash. Now although I didn't feel that Auster's book is a particularly great one I do feel that he manages to demonstrate the daily sufferings following untimely loss far better than Nooteboom does.

This book was not originally written in English so I am willing to admit that it is possible that something was lost in translation. Therefore, if I happen to stumble across another of the author's works I will be willing to give it a go. ( )