Coetzee on Nooteboom

I enjoy few novelists as critics as much as when JM Coetzee steps in to contribute on essay. He’s already written eloquently on Cees Nooteboom in the past, and here he is again, discussing the recently translated Lost Paradise.

Do angels exist? Does God exist? It is not only in the universe of
postmodern fiction that such questions have a quaint,
old-fashioned—that is to say, pre-postmodern and perhaps even
pre-modern—air. In tolerant, post-Enlightenment societies we are free
to make up answers to them as we choose, without risk of punishment.
Indeed, in its advanced form the principle of enlightened tolerance
simply refuses to take such questions seriously. If God works for you
then he must be true (that is to say, true-for-you); and ditto for
angels and the rest of the heavenly hierarchy.

The chief trouble with Nooteboom’s Lost Paradise is that it
is hard to reconcile the skeptical, relativistic spirit of the book as
a whole, particularly its prologue and epilogue, with the story of the
girl from Brazil who exorcises her demon by absorbing traditional
Aboriginal beliefs. It is also hard to make sense of her grounds for
excluding the troubled Dutchman from the paradise he seeks in her arms,
namely that angels cannot consort with human beings. The gods and
goddesses of Greece were not shy of bestowing their favors on mortals.
Why should angels be different?

In respect of relations between human beings and angels, it is worth reading Lost Paradise side by side with Nooteboom’s 1998 novel All Souls Day. . . .

You Might Also Like:

More from Conversational Reading:

1. oy So the Brits are shooting poet Adrian Mitchell’s poem "Human Beings" off into space, just in case any aliens want to know what it’s like...
2. A Fine Week for Coetzee Essays This piece by Pankaj Mishra must be the best criticism of Slow Man I've yet read. More acutely than any other contemporary novelist, Coetzee has...
3. Feeding Anxiety From a TLS review of The Omnivore’s Dilemma. The phrase "omnivore’s dilemma" was coined, thirty years ago, by the psychologist Paul Rozin. It names the...
4. New Nooteboom Cees Nooteboom goes gravehunting, literary-style. ...
5. JM Coetzee on Translation Good article. ARE my books easy or hard to translate? Sentence by sentence, my prose is generally lucid, in the sense that the syntactic relations...

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.