Lost Paradise
Cees Nooteboom Harvill Secker, 149pp, £14.99
Calling a novel Lost Paradise invites a daunting comparison, but Cees Nooteboom has the reputation and the chutzpah to lay down a few gauntlets of this sort. He includes himself in a list of Dutch “literary giants” reeled off by one character, and remarks in the epilogue that the author of Lost Paradise “knew what he was doing”.
This self-reference could be irritating, but it’s tempered by a sense of playfulness and justified by the book’s content. The first of two related stories concerns Alma, a Brazilian woman who travels to Australia to experience Aboriginal society, before taking part in an art project that places actors dressed as angels around Perth. The second focuses on Erik Zondag, a literary critic who visited the project and who encounters Alma again several years later at an alpine spa.
Each of the characters seeks a lost paradise. Alma is recovering after a sexual attack and she is attracted to the “closed world” of indigenous Australian communities as a psychological escape. Erik
finds respite from his unhappy long-term relationships in Alma, an unknown and unknowable woman. Appearing as a character at the end of the novel, Nooteboom presents the completed work as his own lost paradise, validating his self-aggrandisement and adding an extra facet to an intriguing conceit.
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