In this book, Nooteboom sets out to connect two seemingly unrelated strangers whom he has glimpsed on his travels -- a beautiful woman aboard a Berlin-bound flight and a haggard-looking man on a Holland train platform -- and to explore the major impact that small interactions can have on the course of our journeys.The beautiful woman becomes Alma, a young woman of German descent, who leaves her parents' Sao Paolo home on a hot summer night in a fit of depression. Her engine dies in one of the city's most dangerous favelas, a mob surrounds her, and she is pulled from the car.To escape her memory of the assault that follows, she flees across the world to Australia, where she becomes involved in the beautiful but bizarre Angel Project*.Not long after, Dutch literary critic Erik Zontag is in Perth, Australia for a conference. He has found a winged woman curled up in a closet in an empty house. He reaches out, and for a second allows his fingertips to brush her feathers -- and then she speaks.Years later, Erik is still reeling from the fleeting encounter he had with that mysterious woman. Disenchanted with his work and desperately in need of a reprieve from his drinking, he leaves his young girlfriend in Amsterdam and heads for a secluded spa in the forests of Austria.There he finds himself alone in a room with a masseuse whose voice he has heard once before, in a place so far away it seems like a different lifetime -- but which Erik has never been able to forget.The intersection of their paths illuminates the ways in which the divine touches our lives. *The Angel Project took place in Perth, Australia in 2000 as part of the Perth International Arts Festival. It's the brainchild of Deborah Warner. Here is one review...Warner's The Angel Project opens the heart and mind to a number of possibilities. It is conceived as "a poem for Perth", a lone journey for which a bookmark-style programme provides directions to each of the 13 sites in Perth's CBD, many atop the city's all-too-conspicuous skyscrapers. The experience unfurls wonder, intrigue, emptiness, yearning and quest. Will there be angels? Where will they be? Do such things, in this secular age, even exist? "The death of God left the angels in a strange position," someone once said, while Rilke contributed, "Angels, it is said, are often unsure whether they pass among the living or the dead."The solitary pilgrimage begins at the narrow, imposing edifice, Barracks Arch, near Parliament House, and ends on the top of a nondescript, squat car-parking station, where a black-garbed attendant solemnly suggests that you can further survey the urban jungle, clear your head and "who knows what you might see". The sensation and effect of The Angel Project are at once ordinary and strange, humbling and uplifting. Not all the high-up, near-empty voids work any particular magic, although looking out across the flat landscape, the bulbous Swan River and the drift of suburbia, the viewer is made to feel that he or she is looking down from a secret vantage point, up with the birds (and angels?) and roaming a garden set in the most unlikely of positions.After an hour or so, having trekked up ramshackle wooden stairs to desolate lofts, ascended to chalky, blindingly-white rooftops where, amid the glare, I DID see an angel, my imagination, if not running wild, was not in its usually pragmatic frame.After almost three hours, I began to reach the end of my solo journey: early on, peering through a broken fence into "The Wasteland", as one derelict site is dubbed by Warner, the wind blowing through the wispy grass and the ugliness of the decaying branches, debris and graffitied concrete slabs turned vaguely majestic. Why, exactly, I am none too sure. The promise of an encounter with angels? Here? In this sorry mess?The Angel Project may or may not be for jaded, disillusioned souls but it's not for the closed-mind cynic. It looks to higher ground, and, in its shifting urban perspectives of hollow ground and towers of money and ambition, we are asked not just to see and feel how vast, great and mysterious the world is, but how solitary, small and doggedly fixed in our views we can be. Finally, having wandered among office workers and encountered silent, slow-moving or sleeping angels in abandoned or unfinished spaces, we are forced to look deep into ourselves.
"Lost Paradise" starts with a comprehensible premise and quickly lingers into poetic musings with no seeming concern for the plot development. I was interestingly in the right temperament, and was happy to go where Nooteboom happened to take me. Maybe, that is why I wasn't startled as much when the main character, after surviving a horrible gang rape in Brazil, ends up in Australian outbacks looking for... well, something. Her intention is to visit the 'Sickness Dreaming Place'. Along the way, she meets a mysterious native who explains to her the meaning of "Dreamtime". It was easily my favorite part in the book. I am often fascinated by the Australian Aboriginal concepts and have tried to read various books to find satisfactory answers. Till now I haven't found any. The closest I came to understand them was via Chatwin's brilliant book 'The Songlines'. Now, Nooteboom has assured me that there can never be a clear understanding of these ancient concepts for anyone who approach them with reason. It is quiet similar to what Peter Weir was trying to convey through his films "Picnic at the hanging rocks" and "The Last Wave" (especially the latter). Another interesting story arc in the book is the "Angel Project": a participatory art wherein actors dressed as angels are made to hide in various parts of the city, and participants have to trace and find them (it is a beautiful sounding act and I would like to be a part of it myself). The project takes place in Perth, and our female protagonist plays one of the angels. In a parallel narrative, a man encounters a woman he had a brief affair with years ago, during the 'Angel Project', when she was dressed as an angel! Does it ring a bell? It is clearly a set-up for merging both the separate narratives into a cohesive whole. What's commendable is that it's done with total ease, with no trace of a forced connection. It happens the way forms slowly emerge in fog. The above pretty much sums up the traces of events I could make-out. At one point, the writer introduces himself into the story as a passenger on an airplane. I didn't get the meta-fictional connection, or rather the "need" of the author for one. Apart from a few interesting concepts sprinkled here and there, what kept me engrossed was Nooteboom's alluding, meditative narration in the manner of the great European novelists. He is a good storyteller. I think 'Rituals' will make up for a better read as it is the author's more celebrated work.
Do You like book Lost Paradise (2007)?
If you were going to search for a paradise in a present world, where would you go? And if you found it, you have to be doubting whether it still would be one. A paradise, a place in past, how it meets the present, how people are more and more drawn to it is the theme of this mesmerizing book.Nooteboom is a master of travelogue, he makes vivid not only the scenery, but also the scent of the place. Here he uses it to intensify character contemplation. The themes themselves are utterly European and Nooteboom seems to be the right author for them.
—Rianor
An exquisite tale full of symbolism, sensuality and taste.I finished the book in just one sitting and after I turned the last page, I felt as if I had savoured an expensive rare bitter sweet chocolate.Two seemingly disconnected stories in two separate parts.In the first one, Alma and Almut from Brazil decide to make their dream come true and travel to Australia, a country which has always been fascinating to them. Once there, they change in different and unexpected ways, and while Alma is able to confront her inner demons, Almut feels disappointed and misses Sao Paulo.In the second, Erik, a German literary critic travels to a spa to improve his health and meets someone from his past, a person he was never able to forget.Angels in all forms are present along the story, connecting all the characters and leading them to a breathtaking conclusion.Nooteboom addresses to the reader before each part, a gesture I found intimate and delightful, I just loved the humility in which he exposed what his characters meant to him and how they kept living on their own, even after he had written the last page.Stunning novel, brief, dreamlike and smooth, as an angel kiss. Not to be missed.***MIGHT CONTAIN SPOILERS***"I left the heaviness of the tropics, where all is motion and noise, to arrive at this stillness.""You are a secret, even if you don't realise it.""Sometimes I would sooner ask a question than know the answer.""When I stand outside here, I do not just see the stars, I hear them.""I have arrived. And when I leave, I will not need to take anything with me. I have everything.""The triumph comes from realising - if only for a moment - that you are at once mortal and immortal.""Angels can't be with people."
—Dolors
I really liked this, but I'm not quite sure why. I guess it was the author's "Prologue", where he describes seeing a pretty woman on a short aeroplane flight from Amsterdam to Berlin who's carrying a slender book, the title of which he can't see, and that turns out to be...Well, I don't want a spoiler here.Let's just say that behind the entire thing is a sense of a "wink and a nod and 'know-what-I-mean'" which I found convivial. As if you were standing at a bar, having a beer with a friend who's a well-known raconteur, and though every word out of his mouth strains at credulity, you gladly engage, go along for the ride, just to see where it all leads.I will definitely be searching out more Nooteboom.
—Frank
