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54
/100
I Index Overall Rating
Readers
20/100Critics
88/100Scholars
Author:
Cees Nooteboom, Laura Watkinson, Simone Sassen
Publisher:
Yale University Press
Date:
April 26, 2022
Cees Nooteboom reflects upon the life of the mind through a reexamination of books, music, art, travel, and gardening.
What The Reviewers Say
... it seems a telling error that the dates given at the end of the book actually indicate 523 days, the missing ten in keeping, you might argue, with the book’s peculiar mixture of precision and free-associative, sun-drenched day-dreaminess. Who’s counting, when a description of an unidentified Menorcan insect can lead seamlessly to a memory of shrunken heads in a Mexican museum, and from there, via Zurbarán’s meditating saints and the skull capacity of Australopithecus, to Montaigne, Lucretius, and the inconstancy of human belief systems?.
Despite its author’s depth of years, 533 Days doesn’t style itself as a repository of seasoned wisdom. Mr. Nooteboom’s real subject is the one that’s defined his career—mainly, the persistent strangeness of existence and its refusal to be fully resolved by religion, philosophy or science.
... remarkable.
... lyrical, meditative.
