Author Of Death In Venice

Dutch courage in the face of death

THE TITLE ALONE beguiles, never mind that the author is the Dutch original Cees Nooteboom, a determinedly European writer whose masters are Nabokov and Calvino, although he is very much his own man. This philosophical book characteristically defies the rules and is concerned with variations on the theme of death and dying. But it is not depressing; Nooteboom possesses a wry sensitivity and looks at life with an instinctive jauntiness. Little is needed to prompt Nooteboom’s narrator towards reflection, and there is a great deal of it in this sequence of interlinking stories.

Photographs dominate the book. Whether framed on tables or hanging on walls these pictures remind the narrator of people, most of whom are dead, yet their presence remains, if only in the context of the moment in which the picture was taken. In one of the photographs the narrator is looking at a group that includes him. Each person had a subsequent story, some of them tragic. But this book is not about lamentations.

“People you mourn when they die, but also, and that’s the crux, prior to their demise, people you find yourself grieving or even when you are still laughing about them. Vulnerable souls, wounded simpletons, women defying their lot, knights of the sad countenance, men surrounded by a nimbus of disaster.” A tone of gentle irony ebbs and flows through the work; Nooteboom has been well served by the translator Ina Rilke.

In all but two of the eight pieces a male narrator guides the way through observations that are random but precise. The opening sequence is particularly good: not only does Nooteboom begin the book in the third person, but the character is an older man, an art historian caught in the act of remembering. He is examining a photograph taken 40 years earlier, and he has returned to Venice, where he and a young woman once posed together as a stranger held the camera. This is no idle musing: this is active retrieval. The woman has since died.

“What that snapshot really conveyed, he reflected, more as a statement of fact than out of a sense of tragedy or self-pity, was that it was time he started thinking about his own exit.” The story stands alone as a study of ambiguity, and it is this ambiguity that counters, even overpowers, any lingering regret. Nooteboom is a writer who consistently bends fiction into a dense, fluid and innovative discourse. Even at his most profound he retains humour that moves between the deadpan and the discreetly outrageous.

Deaths in Venice: A Centenary Tourist Experience - Raise the Hammer

Deaths in Venice: A Centenary Tourist Experience

All holidays are fabrications. The fact of moving through a place we won't remain in means we don't put down foundations, but instead invent brief possible selves that we never become.

By Mark Fenton
Published July 10, 2011

Earlier this year I stood behind a large group of people in the Louvre who were in turn standing before a painting by Leonardo da Vinci called the Mona Lisa (a.k.a. La Gioconda, a.k.a. Portrait of Lisa Gherardini, wife of Francesco del Giocondo.) I'm fairly sure this painting is available on Google Images if you want to have a look at it.

At this particular stage of my museum fatigue I was less interested in the Mona Lisa as an artwork than in what she gets to look at. In her gaze I saw the tired eyes of "The Panther" in Rainer Maria Rilke's famous poem.

Swap male pronoun for female, substitute tourists for bars and you have the daily grind of Ms. Lisa in a country that's not even her own.

However, at some point the crowd goes home, leaving only a few security guards. And what interests me is what she gets to look at after hours.

The Louvre favours density of hanging. Few walls display only a single painting. Mona Lisa is one, and significantly, so is the wall they have her looking at, which displays "The Wedding at Cana" by Veronese, and nothing else.

Obviously the above photo was taken after hours. Here's how it looks to Mona who sees it not only through a layer of bullet proof glass, but through a screen of visitors whom I suspect some days she wouldn't mind putting bullets through.

As you can see, the dimensions of the painting about equal the footprint of a house in downtown Hamilton.

It's easy to flee past a thousand artworks a minute in the Louvre, and after 20 minutes there in peak season even the most passionate art enthusiast wants to. If you find yourself in that situation, remind yourself that Veronese spent 15 months on this painting, completing it in 1563 for the monastery of San Giorgio Maggiore in Venice, Italy.

Death in Venice, &, A man and his dog

Death in Venice and other stories

Thomas Mann's Death in Venice, a reference guide

Death in Venice and other tales

Death in Venice, and seven other stories