Charming. Dreamy. Beautiful.
Lost Paradise - Dutch author Cees Nooteboom's enchanting short novel about a young lady and an older man and their crossing paths – twice.
I find a special appeal when novels feature multiple narrators, or what I term rotating first person. Lost Paradise
has two narrators: Alma from São Paulo and Erik Zontag from Amsterdam.
Actually, make that three if we include the narrator of the book's
Prologue and Epilogue.
In the spirit of a trailer for a film, here's my own rendition of what could be a Lost Paradise trailer:
PROLOGUE
The
narrator, lets call him Cees, waits for the last passenger to board,
perhaps the smallest airplane he's ever been on. Ah, Cees is in for a
treat. The passenger turns out to be a woman, “the kind of woman you
hope will be seated next to you.” And Cees sees she's been assigned a
window seat in the row ahead of him, on the left hand side, a seat where
he can look at her as much as he wants. This young woman with long legs
in khaki trousers opens a slim book but, darn, she's holding the book
in such a way he can't read the title. Cees, an author himself, is
forever curious about what books people are reading.
PART ONE
“Someone
drove down the Marginal, along the Tietê, past the nouveau riche houses
in Morumbi, and then, without giving a thought to where she was going
or what she was doing, entered forbidden territory – not Ebú-Ecú, but
Paraisópolis, the very worst favela of all, a hell rather than a
paradise, and fraught with danger, making it, at that moment,
irresistible.” That someone is Alma and she's talking about herself in
the third person for a very specific reason: her car broke down in the favela and she was gang raped.
As
a way of attempting to cope with her trauma, Alma is off to the
Australian outback with her lifelong friend, Almut, a cheeky, sexy gal
who always had her walls back home in São Paulo covered with
reproductions of Willem de Kooning and Jean Dubuffet. Like Almut, Alma
planned to study art history in college, but, unlike her friend, her
fascination was not with modern art but the art of the Renaissance. Alma
covered her walls with angels.
Alma and Almut read about the
Aboriginal Dreamtime, and Almut came across something called the
Sickness Dreaming Place. Alma became fascinated and desperately desired
to visit this Sickness Dreaming Place. At one point, the friends split
up, with Alma encountering an Aboriginal artist and his art. She lived
with him for a while and also ventured out to the desert with him. Once
back together, in order to acquire a skill to make money, the Brazilian
gals took classes in physical therapy and massage.
Just when
their funds are about to run out, Almut lets Alma know they can drive to
Perth and make good money by taking part in a piece of performance art
where they'll be dressed up as angles. “They give us a pair of wings and
every day for a week someone picks us up and takes us to a hiding place
in a church, or in a ruin, or in a bank. We just have to say put all
day and let people find us. Somehow it's all related to Paradise Lost.”
So they're off. And, as an angel, Alma has an encounter with an older
man that proves moving and profound – for them both.
PART TWO
Erik
Zontag is pushing fifty, a Dutch literary critic for a newspaper. His
scathing review of the latest novel by one of his country's literary
giants arrives on his doorstep that very morning. His girlfriend, Anja,
eighteen years his junior and herself an art critic for a rival
newspaper, accuses Zontag of writing an unfair review. No matter; this
morning he's off from Amsterdam to an exclusive spa in the Austrian
mountains.
Eric had mixed emotions about spending a week at a spa
specializing in weight loss, but after five days he's feeling
positively rejuvenated. Then it happens. He receives a note upon
returning from his morning hike telling him the woman who has been given
him a massage had a minor accident and someone else will be taking her
place. Eric goes to meet her. "They have met before - that much is
clear. What no one can see, however, are the wings he mentally attaches
to her back, the wings of an angel he has never been able to forget."
EPILOGUE
Cees' plane has landed and he's now taking trains to his final
destination. At one of the stations, he spots the woman. “She is wearing
the same outfit she had on the plane and is carrying the same book –
the book I thought I had written, the book I still have not been able to
shake off." Cees summons the courage to speak to her, asks her for her
opinion of the book. As to what book this attractive lass has been
reading and what she has to say...for each reader to discover. But I'll
give a hint. This epilogue mirrors the tale of Alma and Zontage.
Thank you, Cees Nooteboom, for this splendid novel.
Dutch author Cess Nooteboom, born 1933
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