533

Cees Nooteboom

Laura Watkinson

"A lyrical 'book of days' . . . A bejewelled mosaic" Financial Times

"Humane insightful and deeply cultured" Times Literary Supplement

Though a tireless explorer of distant cultures for more than forty years Cees Nooteboom has also been returning to Menorca "the island of the wind" and it is in his house there with a study full of books and a garden taken over by cacti and many insects that the 533 days of writing take place.

The result is not a diary nor a set of movements of the soul organised by dates but "a book of days" with observations about what is immediately around him his love for Menorca his thoughts on the world on life and death on literature and oblivion. Every impression opens windows onto vast horizons: the Divine Comedy and the books it generated the contempt of Borges for Gombrowicz the death of David Bowie the endless flight of the Voyagers the repetition of history as a tragedy but never as farce.

533 is a meditative rhapsody that would like to exclude the noise of current events yet must return to them several times and sceptically contemplates the threat of a disintegrating Europe. Reading this book is like having an extraordinary conversation with an extraordinary mind.

"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" De Volkskrant

"The 533 days captivate in their undisguised openness to the world" Süddeutsche Zeitung

Photographs by Simone Sassen * Translated from the Dutch by Laura Watkinson

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