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Review [published October 2002]
Cees Nooteboom: All Souls’ Day
Stephen Mitchelmore
“The shortcut does not allow one to arrive someplace
more directly (more quickly), but rather to lose the way
that ought to lead there.” – Maurice Blanchot
How does one deal with trauma? It’s a common
question. Arthur Daane, roving documentary cameraman
and protagonist of Cees Nooteboom’s latest novel,
asks it too. He thinks of some of the traumatic events
of his time:
“The woman who happened to be passing by when
the bomb exploded in Madrid, the seven Trappist monks
whose throats were cut in Algiers, the 20 boys gunned
down before their parents’ eyes in Colombia, the entire
trainful of commuters hacked to death with machetes
in a five-minute burst of orgiastic fury in Johannesburg,
the 200 passengers on the plane that exploded above
the sea, the two, three or 6,000 men and boys killed
in Srebrenica, the hundreds of thousand of woman and
children slain in Rwanda, Burundi, Liberia, Angola.”
The list could go on and on. And that fact, Daane
thinks, is perhaps the worst. “For one moment, a day, a
week, they were front-page news, for several seconds
they flowed through cables in every part of the globe,
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and then it began, the black, delete-button darkness of
oblivion.” Amnesia sets in “as if … humanity wasn’t
interested in individual names, only the blind survival
of the species.”
Daane is, as you might have guessed, a melancholy
soul. But his otherwise mundane ruminations have a
traumatic resonance. Some time before the novel begins,
his wife and child were killed in a place crash.
Alone, in time between jobs, he wanders the streets of
Berlin with his camera, recording quiet moments at
dawn or dusk in a city full of ghosts. This is his way
of resisting amnesia, and yet it is also his way of forgetting
(“dealing with” one might say) the permanent
absence of his family. The paradox is central to his melancholy
and to this novel. How can he move on without
obliterating their individual names? The temptation is
to dive into work, into experience and other forms of
forgetfulness, but to do that, he thinks, would, in turn,
lead to the sleep of reason, thereby summoning up the
nightmares already spoken of.
In first half of the novel, we follow Arthur on his
wandering. He visits friends in a bar, gets caught up
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