Novels about places you’ve been

Cees Nooteboom, All Soul’s Day.

A novel that is a walk through Berlin, and a record of conversations held in Berlin. Mostly a clash between the familiar streets and the unfamiliar manner of conversing. Who talks like this? And if even my life brings me into contact with occasional glimpses of intellectual eccentricity, all of these taken together would not even fill a page of this book. But this difference, between the seen and the said, may well be one of the its pleasures. It contains things one could have been saying and a could is a promise.

But if Brandenburger Tor and Potsdamer Platz are places one is used to encounter in all kinds of representations of this city, from films to official documents to tourist brochures, the clash between what the novel narrates and my remembrance becomes almost laughable when Arthur Daane (the protagonist) decides to follow a woman into the Staatsbibliothek zu Berlin. A place where I have spent many hours and nonetheless one that still manages to unveil new nooks in its open 1960s architechture. I know exactly where each of the narrator’s footsteps falls (even the route between the Staatsbibliothek and the Ibero-Amerikanische Institut that, according to the novel, is only for those in the know) and yet the encounters he has in this building are so unlike any I have ever had there. And so I need to remind myself that I am reading a work of fiction and that even if I could remember every detail in the book before reading them there, the details I read would still differ from the real place that I remember.

In describing objects, a novel also always describes itself. And so the open space of Nooteboom’s Staatsbibliothek is not only like to the actual building, irregular, ochre-coloured, but also like to the book itself, lichtdurchflutet, yet full of nooks. Nis, Dutch for niche, is the first word that the book pauses to contemplate. Its untranslatability. And in like manner lichtdurchflutet, flowed through with light, is a word that seems to belong as uniquely to this building as it does to the German language.