If you like the stylistic charm, the ironic play with paradox and the lightness of touch of writers like Italo Calvino or Jorge Luis Borges, then you’ll like Nooteboom’s Song of Truth and Semblance. It is a slight but utterly enchanting tale that interweaves fiction and reality, manipulates doubles and complementarities and draws the writer into his own writing.


Two story lines constantly alternate and intermingle. The first of these concerns a contemporary Dutch writer and his worldly-wise but pedestrian colleague. The two, designated simply as ‘the writer’ and ‘the other writer’, regularly run into each other in Amsterdam and exchange views about their ongoing work, the role of the imagination, the reality of characters which exist only in fiction and other such topics. Interestingly, the ‘other writer’, who reckons that writers should get on with telling stories and not bore their readers by speculating about it, does most of the talking. Jorge Luis Borges and the Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa — who tried to disappear behind the ‘heteronyms’ (multiple pseudonyms) under which he published his poems — are frequently mentioned in these conversations.


The other storyline traces the characters and subsequent development of the story on which the writer has just embarked. This story begins with the writer clearly seeing in the mind’s eye the outline of a shoulder, an arm, a face, a body and then its surroundings, two men talking, one a colonel, the other a doctor, both are Bulgarians living a hundred years ago, in the 1870s. A vision, an imagined scene, thus assumes reality, and the characters come alive.


The colonel, Lyuben Georgiev, a heavily-built man in his forties, is a veteran of Bulgarian rebellions against Turkish rule and a fervent nationalist. His friend, Stefan Fièev, who thinks of himself as the colonel’s intellectual superior, takes a more cynical view of things and champions Italy as the cradle of culture. Both men have their secrets. For the colonel the bloody battlefields of the past reappear in his nightmares, which leave him shaking with fear. The doctor cultivates a perverse form of jealousy, to which he gives free rein after he has married the pale, ghostlike Laura. The couple go to Rome for their honeymoon and invite the colonel along. Oddly enough, the doctor finds himself disappointed in Italy, while the colonel not only enjoys the sights but ends up in bed with the doctor’s wife.


Meanwhile the writer, too, has travelled to Rome, where he visits the monuments and meditates on such things as the mysteries of time and the endurance of the past into the present. He occasionally glimpses the three Bulgarians, but they remain unaware of him. When finally the writer, having been badgered by the other writer to get something into print, tears up his manuscript and burns it, the colonel, the doctor and his wife are left for dead.


Of course, the whole story is an airy, intellectual fantasy. Though contrived, it is haunting, not only because of the many clever parallels, contrasts and multiple layers that will have you turning the pages back and forth, but no less so because the exquisite writing allows all these ambiguities to do their work. As a piece of imaginative fiction which recoils on itself and raises questions about its own reality, the story leaves you pondering the nature of fiction and its relation to life, the world and the writer. That is why it is hard to think of a better and more enjoyable introduction to Nooteboom or, for that matter, to a central strand in postmodern writing.

He drained his glass in one draught, looked with feigned entreaty at the publisher, and said: ‘Another?’

The publisher stood up without a word and walked the long distance to the bar.

‘He’ll be quite some while,’ said the other writer, assessing the queue the publisher had to join, ‘because I wanted to say something very disagreeable to you, and there is no need for him to hear it.’

He pressed his finger against the middle of his forehead as if to put a secret sign on it, and said: ‘What I mean is this: For that kind of highly intellectual exercise you need caliber, and you don’t have that. Neither have I, but I know it. You don’t even know it, and that is what’s wrong. Down there, with Pessoa, it hurts, and up there, with Borges, it is cold. Very very cold.’

‘I never wanted to be there,’ the writer said, suddenly thinking how odd it sounded. ‘It’s just that I wonder about certain things. I wonder what exactly someone is doing when he writes a story, and surely that is the least you may wonder about. And besides...’ (p. 55, tr. Adrienne Dixon)