The repetition of history as tragedy, but never as a farce

533: A Book of Days, tells the story through a tireless explorer of distant cultures, for more than forty year Cees Nooteboom has been returning to the Island of Menoca, “the Island of 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.

A Book of days retains “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 Menoca, his thoughts on the world and on the place we humans have in the universe.

Every impression opens windows on vast horizons: the Divine Comedy and the book it generated, the impossible encounter between Montaigne and Feldman’s music, the contempt of beloved Borges for his beloved Gombrowicz, the death of David Bowie, the endless fight of the Voyagers, the repetition of history as tragedy, but never as a farce.

 533 is a mediative rhapsody that would like to exclude the noise of current events, yet sceptically contemplat4s the threat of a disintegrating Europe and must return to them several times, because if, as Candide says “ one must cultivate one’s own garden”, one’s own garden is in the world, whether you like it or not.

Nooteboom can butterfly across themes and delve in to draw out the thought provoking nector. The cactuses of green, the spines and the plain eye catching sturdiness allow his mind to wander this way and that and muses on authors and literature, on politics and new, and upon the simple pleasures of life. A butterfly pair alights on the beautiful entrance gate to his property, only to discover they are incomers and dangerous to certain plants. The Wild tortoises wander around, nibbling his beloved cacti and he is alert to the dulcet, sonorous calling of his neighbour’s cockerel. As thinking becomes quite dense, as he disappears down various rabbit holes of thought,  with an open invitation to readers to loop into his life and share his insightful ramblings and observations.    

During the “hunger winter” of 1944-45, famine killed thousands in the German occupied Netherlands. Cees Nooteboom remembers his father “ on a seagull hunt” trying to catch birds for food. His father died in a British bombing raid. Nooteboom recalls “a dead English pilot hanging from his parachute”. “ I am still a child at war, and after that the cold war”.

533: A Book of Days by Cees Nooteboom, translated by Leurs Watkinson, Meclehose Press £16.99, 226 pages