ABSTRACT
Especially welcome in translation are the poetic prose narratives of the Dutch writer, Cees Nooteboom, who has been rendered by David Colmer. Known for his novels as well, Nooteboom has put together a sequence of short texts in response to drawings made by the Berlin-based artist Max Neumann, whose suggestive, half-abstract, half-figurative pictures are reproduced in the book. The act of self-portraiture presupposes examining oneself as someone else, and here a second portrayer is involved. While bristling with paradoxes about the self and the Other, Nooteboom's thirty-three mini-narratives often sketch improbable, fantastical, yet somehow believable scenes whose implications extend beyond the enigmas of the singular self and concern all humanity, perhaps after an apocalypse. Like Nooteboom, Brandt meditates on, and especially plays with, the paradoxes of the self and whatever Other or otherness faces him. Meaning can depend on how intonation is given or punctuation interpreted, at least in the careful English versions to which the author's reading is restricted.
