- Hardcover: 512 pages
- Publisher: Picador; First UK Edition First Impression edition (9 Nov 2001)
- Language English
- ISBN-10: 033039259X
- ISBN-13: 978-0330392594
- Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
- Amazon Bestsellers Rank: 1,248,083 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
All Souls' Day
and over 900,000 other books are available for Amazon Kindle .
Learn more
| |||||||||||||||||||||||||
Did you know you can trade in your old books for an Amazon.co.uk Gift Card to spend on the things you want? Visit the Amazon.co.uk Trade-In Store for more details. |
Product details |
More About the Authors
Discover books, learn about writers, and more.
Product Description
Review
Arthur Daane is a Dutch cinematographer, a sought-after maker of documentaries specializing, it seems to his friends, in the misery and suffering that stalks us all: famine, flood, war and its evils. But Arthur's real work is his obsessive filming of ordinary life, what he calls the anonymous, voiceless world as opposed to the public scenes he is commissioned to portray. Few people have seen his collection of pictures of this second world and fewer still would understand. Most of the action of this novel takes place in Berlin where Arthur is a cherished member of a small group of artists, philosophers and writers. Their rich conversation when they meet in bars and restaurants is funny, thought-provoking and dense. Anything can set them off - food, language, music, a word, an idea or an anecdote and the witty but serious discussion starts. Arthur is alone for much of the day. He loves the city and sets off each morning with his camera to visit his favourite places, each one filled with echoes of the past, his own personal ghosts or the traces of historical events. Nooteboom shows us Berlin through the photographer's eye, each scene 'a flake of time as hard as marble chipped off a block of time'. On one level the book is a fine travel guide, on another the moving story of a grieving man trying to let go of the past. Arthur's progress is told in detail: meals, conversations, assignments, memories of the past and hopeful encounters with a young woman. These chapters are punctuated by shorter passages written in another voice - that of the souls of the title who comment on what Arthur and the other living characters are doing and what may still befall them. This is a book to read slowly and think about, a book to keep and read again many times. (Kirkus UK)
A documentary filmmaker's tenuous hold on both reality and the past occupies the foreground of this very discursive 1998 novel by the prizewinning Dutch author ("The Following Story", 1994, etc.). On All Souls' Day, November 2nd, prayers are offered on behalf of those who dwell in Purgatory. This practice neatly symbolizes the condition of 45-year-old Arthur Daane, who is mourning the deaths of his wife and son in a plane crash, and relocates to Berlin (after reunification)-reasoning that a place that has its own painful history to deal with is where he may as well be. There's very little more in the way of action or incident here than this, as Nooteboom fills the story with Daane's meditations on photography, history, art, the ideas of eminent philosophers (he has made a film about Nietzsche, and considers Walter Benjamin as a subject), and other matters: generally, the filmmaker's (and the writer's) vain efforts to capture and "stop" time, thus preventing it from elapsing. There are also numerous conversations with fellow emigres and friends, including sculptor-writer Victor Leven (eternally haunted by the memory of WWII), "philosopher-turned-lunatic" Arthur Tieck (who has appeared in Daane films), and-back home in The Netherlands-Daane's platonic confidante Erna, who isn't much more than a device to help keep the talk flowing. When Daane meets lissome history student Elik Olanje, and follows her to Spain, dramatic things begin happening-too late, alas, to vitiate the reader's conviction that he has been subject to an intolerably overextended harangue. "All Souls' Day "displays with admirable lucidity the workings of a humane, civilized, and consistently interesting mind. But it's just barely a novel, and few readers are likely to stay its tortuous and redundant course. (Kirkus Reviews)
A documentary filmmaker's tenuous hold on both reality and the past occupies the foreground of this very discursive 1998 novel by the prizewinning Dutch author ("The Following Story", 1994, etc.). On All Souls' Day, November 2nd, prayers are offered on behalf of those who dwell in Purgatory. This practice neatly symbolizes the condition of 45-year-old Arthur Daane, who is mourning the deaths of his wife and son in a plane crash, and relocates to Berlin (after reunification)-reasoning that a place that has its own painful history to deal with is where he may as well be. There's very little more in the way of action or incident here than this, as Nooteboom fills the story with Daane's meditations on photography, history, art, the ideas of eminent philosophers (he has made a film about Nietzsche, and considers Walter Benjamin as a subject), and other matters: generally, the filmmaker's (and the writer's) vain efforts to capture and "stop" time, thus preventing it from elapsing. There are also numerous conversations with fellow emigres and friends, including sculptor-writer Victor Leven (eternally haunted by the memory of WWII), "philosopher-turned-lunatic" Arthur Tieck (who has appeared in Daane films), and-back home in The Netherlands-Daane's platonic confidante Erna, who isn't much more than a device to help keep the talk flowing. When Daane meets lissome history student Elik Olanje, and follows her to Spain, dramatic things begin happening-too late, alas, to vitiate the reader's conviction that he has been subject to an intolerably overextended harangue. "All Souls' Day "displays with admirable lucidity the workings of a humane, civilized, and consistently interesting mind. But it's just barely a novel, and few readers are likely to stay its tortuous and redundant course. (Kirkus Reviews)
Product Description
In ALL SOULS we follow Arthur Daane, a documentary film maker, as he travels around the streets of Berlin. The city provides the backdrop for Daane's reflections on his life as he plans his latest project - a self-funded film that will show the world through Daane's eyes. The book's cumulative power of remembered images and philosophical musings on the meaning of our contemporary existence infuses Nooteboom's new novel. ALL SOULS is a poignant, deeply affecting novel about a man coming to terms with his own place in the world.
Suggested Tags from Similar Products(What's this?)Be the first one to add a relevant tag (keyword that's strongly related to this product)
|
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
|
Share your thoughts with other customers:
|
||||||||||||||||||||||
|
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
meditative and mysterious,
By
This review is from: All Souls' Day (Paperback)
'All Souls Day' is a very interesting book. Although it appears to a very meditative / thoughtful book with very little plot there is something much deeper, it is something like an allegory / parallel. The storyline is that Arthur Daane is quite a lonely figure, a dutch man living in Berlin. He has friends but they find him very mysterious. He meets a young female called Elik who is researching an obscure medieval spanish queen. At the same time as the process of two people testing each other trying to find out each others past his friends are trying to help her to study the process of history, finding secrets about each other and about the events that happened to people in the past.It starts off with looking at the dutch word for history - geschiedenis ie the study of niches, the study of hiding places. The style is fascinating in that the narrative voice changes between characters quite frequently. This can be confusing but once you get to grips with it, it becomes enlightening, you even have dead people talking and aliens! There were parts I wasn't happy with, the end in particular so I'm only giving it 4 stars but it really deserves 4 and a half. I loved reading this book, I was reading it when I was traveling through the jungle in Peru and it was perfect.
5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
A Very Dutch Novel,
By
This review is from: All Souls' Day (Paperback)
The storyline is not the main point of interest in reading this book. The story in a nutsheell being that Arthur an aging single freelance camera man (single due to the death of his wife and child in a plane crash some time ago) goes about his life in Berlin and muses on life with his dutch friends. One day he meets a very attractive, very young girl who decides to use and abuse him and this event changes his perception of life. Funny how all the books I've been reading recently have an ugly, portly aging middle age man meeting stunningly attractive young women who can't leave them alone! In any respect the main interest of the novel is the author's musings on being dutch, being dutch in Germany, what its like to live in Berlin and philosophical chats with his obscure friends over large piles of sausages in a cafe. I learnt somethings I didn 't know about the dutch such as the fact that the gender of arcticles was removed some time ago to simplify the language as well as something of what life in Berlin around the time the wall faded away. I really enjoyed some of the conversations with his friends which ramble on, for example discussing how we humans perceive ourselves at any one point in time and in particular that we feel somewhat superieur to our predecessors but we ourselves will end up as museum pieces, chewed over, written about and filed in a library. To me the story line with his psuedo love interest was almost a distraction from the main show in the cafe. So if you like stories this book is probably not for you and its not consistent enough to be a great novel (hence only 4 stars) but it has many interesting ideas and thoughts and is worth the read for that alone.
1 of 2 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Soles of Memory,
By Madly Bobbington-Blythe "MadBob" (Cardiff) - See all my reviews
This review is from: All Souls' Day (Paperback)
Arthur Daane is a Dutch cinematographer, numbed by the death of his wife and child, attempting to capture the forgotten moments of life on film as he flits from job to job, from city to city. When he first appears, this lost soul is wandering the streets of post-Iron Curtain Berlin, feeling the history of the city through his feet, what his eccentric friend Victor calls the "soles of memory". His is an itinerant life, and near aimless with it, until he meets an intriguing female student named Elik.
Nooteboom's grasp of history, his playful toying with Dutch and German and his near didactic philosophising mean that the increased volume of what is a meatier tome than his usual slim fables allows scope for a breathtaking depiction of a scarred Berlin and a cacophonous echoing of digression. This is dark and edgy, yet beautiful and powerful, much like the mysterious and bewitching Elik Oranje.
Share your thoughts with other customers: Create your own review
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
|
|
Customer Discussions
|
This product's forum
Active discussions in related forums
Search Customer Discussions
|
Related forums
|
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
