Damaged Souls Wandering Through Europe’s Graveyard

Elik Oranje is a young woman with a Dutch name, North African eyes and a “closed-in” face scarred by a rapist, her mother’s boyfriend, when she was a child. She lives in Berlin at the end of the 20th century, researching the life of a 12th century Spanish queen for her PhD thesis.

She has a desperate need for love but, because of her history, is determined not to act on it.

Arthur Daane is a middle-aged Dutch documentary filmmaker whose wife and son died in a plane crash. Mourning, he circles the globe restlessly with his camera, shooting temples in Japan, atrocities in Bosnia. He visits Berlin to talk, eat and drink with a group of eccentric friends--Victor, a Dutch sculptor; Arno, a German philosopher; and Zenobia, Arno’s Russian sister-in-law, a physicist who, as a child during World War II, survived the siege of Leningrad.

Elik and Arthur meet, reaching for the same newspaper in a library. In an ordinary novel, this would be the prelude to romance. The veteran Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, however, has anything but a typical love story in mind.

Both lovers strenuously resist the forces pulling them together. Elik dreads being vulnerable; she is “a world champion at saying goodbye.” Arthur hates being roused from the routine that has numbed his pain--a routine that includes filming seemingly random objects and scenes that he hopes to assemble into a private documentary, one that will make sense of Europe’s terrible but constantly vanishing history.

George Orwell called Europe a “bone-heap”--and this on the eve of World War II, before widespread knowledge of Stalin’s crimes or the Holocaust, before the Cold War, the East German Stasi, the wall that divided Berlin. Arthur roams streets and squares where Hitler’s bunker and Gestapo torture chambers used to be; where the wall, which dominated the city’s life for 40 years, is a fading scar. He passes old people who lived under every regime beginning with the Kaiser, young people for whom none of this layered, ghostly past seems real.

Elik discovers that her Spanish queen, whom she hoped to rescue from oblivion, may have slipped too far into the past. All that remains of her is a handful of documents, a worldview that no modern person can share and doubt that even words as basic as “road” or “orgasm” could have the same meaning after 800 years. Arthur’s problem is more personal. His wife and son haunt but can’t comfort him. He’s less and less able to recall them as alive and present, and this--their diminishing reality--is exactly what makes their loss so hard to bear.

Arthur’s friends are kind as well as learned and witty, and have suffered their own losses. They help him.

And Nooteboom (“Roads to Santiago,” “The Following Story”) supplies another, unexpected layer of commentary: From time to time the narrative is interrupted by a voice that calls itself “we” and takes a detached, omniscient view. It’s the voice, we realize, of the dead--the “All Souls” of the title--who have escaped history at last.

Still, talk is talk, and even the best thinking isn’t necessarily drama. We can give Nooteboom credit for vivid and concrete description, for his ease in crossing Europe’s national and cultural borders; we can allow that European readers may have more tolerance for philosophizing in their fiction than we do. Nonetheless, Elik doesn’t arrive a page too soon. Arthur needs her, and so does the story. Like a hibernating animal, it sniffs her, growls and stirs itself, sheds its old skin and lumbers south to Spain for a rendezvous whose outcome is uncertain until the very end.