Review
A brief, sweet book, rich with dreaming and gentle
philosophizing,
Lost Paradise is best read at a leisurely clip all in one
afternoon. To split its 150 pages (with generous margins and small trim size)
would be to lose the thread – a remarkably gossamer thread – that could easily
be broken by a day of work or night of sleep. Placing trust in ideas and
ruminations, Cees Nooteboom does away with the trappings of traceable plot lines
and solid characters until the very end, when the myopic lens through which
we've been peering clicks into focus and reveals the tableau that we've been
squinting at all along.
What seems at first like a writer being bossed about by his
characters, and in the process getting bogged down by their exclusive
meditations, becomes an often beautiful show, in which the puppet is revealed to
be holding the strings,...
Beyond the Book
About the Dreamtime
Nooteboom introduces us to Alma and Almut, best friends barely
out of teenagehood, as they leave their childhood homes in Sao Paulo, Brazil for
Australia. They're on a rather listless quest in search of The Dreamtime, an
Aboriginal concept of creation and spiritual existence with which the two best
friends have become enamored and obsessed. The psychological and spiritual
experience of The Dreamtime is notoriously impossible to explain to those
outside the secretive Aboriginal culture, but the basis for the belief is well
documented.
Considered by some to be the longest continuous culture on
earth, the Aborigines are the descendents of the first known human inhabitants
of Australia. Divided into over 500 tribal groups with...
