Collection adds to case for Nobel Laureate nomination

The Foxes Come at Night, Cees Nooteboom. Maclehose Press, £12.

SET among the islands of the Mediterranean, this short collection of stories from Dutch author Cees Nooteboom represents the truest, most distilled form of literary writing.

There is little in the way of plot, but then narrative is less Nooteboom’s concern than the careful, philosophical consideration of life, death, and the thin line between them where tedium and profundity can somehow coexist.

Drawing on his long experience as a travel writer, as well as an extensive knowledge of Minorca and its neighbours gained by living there for half of every year, Nooteboom’s Mediterranean is a self-contained world of “marble steps” and “cormorant-shaped gondolas”. His harbours all play host to “womanly ships” and his characters are all driven by “black bile” to tackle “riddles that have never been solved”.

Which is not to say these stories are depressing. If anything, they are the opposite, a celebration of passion and of the self-reliance which fills the void when ardor cools. “I am my own barometer,” says the protagonist of Thunderstorm, a man mired in a passive-aggressive relationship but who endures it because it is better than being alone. When word reaches him of a tourist struck by lightning on a nearby beach, it is impossible to escape comparisons between the hot sparks and dissolving worlds of the fatal bolt and the equally unlikely prospect of falling in love.

The author’s erudite style, carefully translated by Ina Rilke, is an object lesson in the concern for language to which Nooteboom subscribes. A surprise is the degree to which the collection is dominated by the visual, by photographs and memories, past moments captured and preserved even as their once vital subjects “have been relegated to the realm of the dead”. Indeed, the eight pieces here are linked so closely by this notion that they function less as individual stories and more like a sustained meditation on the topic.

While not every piece here is perfect, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Take Heinz, a tale of a Dutch vice-consul melting away on the Ligurian coast. It may lack the razor-edge precision of the old woman’s recollections in Late September, or the hammer blow insights offered up by the art historian of Gondolas, but in its meandering way it is a more honest story,

Such occasional sharp edges make the stories here a perfect introduction to the fiction of this European master, an author often spoken of — in the hushed circles of such things — as a potential Nobel Laureate. A brief, beguiling collection, The Foxes Come at Night can only strengthen the case for Nooteboom’s candidature.