533: A Book of Days (Hardback)

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. He amazes the reader with images that are bursting with energy. Nooteboom's book of days is a magnificent book. It is written in an outstanding style. He writes about the most ordinary things, but in a lyrical way . . . A jewel of a book A journal of observations and reflections, full of profundities and bright linguistic concision the 533 days captivate in their undisguised openness to the world To read Cees Nooteboom is to be introduced to a rarefied and stately European sensibility: classically educated, receptive, lyrical . . . Nooteboom forces his readers to reflect on what is being said, and to take up their part in the work: for him, literature is a collaborative effort. Nooteboom is a writer who can butterfly across themes and delve in to draw out the thought provoking nectar A lyrical, meditative 'book of days' . . . A bejewelled prose mosaic of plants, creatures, books and memories, elegantly rendered by Laura Watkinson It's testimony to the power of this humane, insightful and deeply cultured book that it should resolve the dissonance so gracefully, between the monastic urge to contemplation and the world it would repudiate. Nooteboom's real subject is the one that's defined his career-mainly, the persistent strangeness of existence and its refusal to be fully resolved by religion, philosophy, or science. . . . His journal . . . can seem like a medieval bestiary, a nature chronicle with the vividness of a dream.