Volume 44, Number 12 · July 17, 1997
Blowing Hot and Cold
By J.M. Coetzee
In the Dutch Mountains
by Cees Nooteboom, translated by Adrienne Dixon
Harcourt Brace, 128 pp., $11.00 (paper)
Roads to Santiago: Detours and Riddles in the Lands and History of Spain
by Cees Nooteboom, by Ina Rilke
Harcourt Brace, 352 pp., $25.00
Toward the end of Cees Nooteboom's novel In the Dutch Mountains, the novelist-narrator—by this point all but indistinguishable from Nooteboom himself—gets into a debate about truth and fiction with the shades of Plato, Milan Kundera, and Hans Christian Andersen. Why, asks the Nooteboom figure, do I have this irrepressible desire to fictionalize, to tell lies? (Adrienne Dixon mistranslates this as an 'irresponsible' desire.) 'From unhappiness,' answers Andersen. 'But you are not unhappy enough. That's why you can't bring it off.' ('That's why you can't do it,' translates Dixon.)
Review, 3884 words
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