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All Souls' Day (Paperback)

by Nooteboom Cees (Author)
4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)

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Product details

  • Paperback: 200 pages
  • Publisher: Picador; New edition edition (9 Aug 2002)
  • Language English
  • ISBN-10: 0330392603
  • ISBN-13: 978-0330392600
  • Product Dimensions: 19.2 x 13 x 2.4 cm
  • Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 64,764 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Product Description

Product Description

Arthur Daane, a documentary film-maker and inveterate globetrotter, has lost his wife and child in a plane crash.

In ALL SOULS' DAY we follow Arthur as he wanders the streets of Berlin, a city uniquely shaped by history. Berlin provides the backdrop for Daane's reflections on life as he plans his latest project - a self-funded film that will show the world through Daane's eyes. With a new circle of friends - a philosopher, a sculptor and a physicist - Arthur discusses everything from history to metaphysics, and the cumulative power of remembered images and philosophical musings on the meaning of our contemporary existence comes to permeate the atmosphere of the book. Then one cold, wintry day, Daane meets the young history student Elik Orange and his world is turned upside down. Whenever this mysterious woman beckons, Daane is compelled to follow.

ALL SOULS' DAY is, finally, an elegiac love story in which the personal histories of the characters are skilfully interwoven with the history of the countries in which they find themselves. It is also the poignant and affecting tale of a man coming to terms with his place in the world.

'Nooteboom is one of the great modern novelists' A.S. Byatt



About the Author

Cees Nooteboom, born in The Hague in 1933, has built up an imposing oeuvre made up of novels, collections of poetry, short stories and also travel stories, many of which were first published in magazines and newspapers. With his novel Rituals he won both the Dutch Bordewijk Prize and the Pegasus Prize for Literature, and The Following Story was awarded the European Literature Prize in 1993. An inveterate traveller, Nooteboom lives by turns in Germany, Spain and the Netherlands.

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Customer Reviews

3 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
4.3 out of 5 stars (3 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews

 
5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars meditative and mysterious, 9 Oct 2003
By Mr. Roderick W. White (Belfast, Co Down United Kingdom) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   
'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.

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5 of 7 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars A Very Dutch Novel, 17 Aug 2003
By Elizabeth Taylor (France) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)      
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.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars Soles of Memory, 26 Dec 2006
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.


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