All Souls' Day

Cees Nooteboom, All Souls Day. Translated by Susan Massotty. New York: Harcourt, 2001. 352pp. $25. ISBN 0-15-100566-4 All Souls Day, first published in Holland in 1998 and the latest of Cees Nooteboom's novels to be translated into English, takes a familiar line from the close of The Great Gatsby as an epigraph : "So we beat on, boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past." Fitzgerald's lapidary melancholy sets the tone of the novel that follows. In it, the past is not merely "another country," as L.P. Hartley once put it, but has sealed its borders for good. What remains are the tatters of collective memory: fragmentary reports, ambiguous testimony, the shaping pressure of events keenly felt but imperfectly grasped. At the heart of All Souls Day is the intuition that history determines the present yet remains elusive and obscure. The novel attempts to elucidate this paradox. Opening in Berlin during a snowstorm in the winter of 1996-97, All Souls Day follows the cinematographer Arthur Daane, on hiatus from the freelance assignments that take him to Bosnia, Somalia, Guatemala, and other flashpoints of conflict around the globe. Daane takes pride in his work but finds it insufficiently expressive, particularly in light of a shattering loss: his wife and young son were killed in a plane crash in the mid-1980s. What he calls his "real work," a deeply personal film made up of "random images that seemed to lack all rhyme or reason, but were connected somehow," is quite different from his dispatches from the front lines of atrocity. As Daane wanders through the Berlin streets in the book's early scenes, the snow evokes a discomfiting sense of amnesia blanketing the city. Coming upon the "vast plain" of Ernst-Reuter-Platz in what was once East Berlin, Daane reflects that the "accumulation of the casual and intertwined actions of both victims and perpetrators" made the city "a memento you could wander around in for years," but adds: The Berliners themselves, probably out of a sense of preservation, didn't have time for such reflection. They were too busy bulldozing the scars. What kind of memory would you need to be able to deal with it? It would be unbearable, it would collapse under its own weight, swallow everything in sight, suck the living down with the dead. Here as elsewhere in All Souls Day, the note of accusation toward Berliners as they rush headlong into the future gives way to exculpation. For all but the most exceptional Germans-such as Daane's friend, the essayist Arno Tieck-Nooteboom casts historical memory as an unmanageable, indeed a potentially annihilating burden. His attachment to Berlin hovering between outraged fascination and fierce love, Daane confronts the city's history from a perspective that its native-born residents, "probably out of a sense of preservation," are unable to assume. Nooteboom suggests that the Dutch possess a distinct sensibility, one that shows itself in the habitual flouting of order as well as a preoccupation with clarity and precision; these national character traits are set in opposition to the Germans' trademark efficiency and the murky excesses of Sturm and Drang. From the novel's first paragraph, Nooteboom is at ease (too much so, to my mind) generalizing on the basis of nationality. He compares the German word for history, Geschichte, with the Dutch geschiedenis, which "sounded less ominous," perhaps "because of the last three letters, the suffix nis, which also meant `niche.'" The implication is that his cosmopolitan Dutch protagonist is immune to guilt-induced paralysis as well as the more nefarious ideological temptations of German history. He can bear witness-literally, with his camera-where Germans must be blind. The essence of national character, the claims the dead make on the living, and our tenuous links with the past are All Souls Days grand themes. Ultimately Nooteboom takes them beyond the German context by the unlikely means of a love story. …