Nooteboom and the Aran islands

Cees Nooteboom, now 75, is one of the two Dutch writers -- along with his slightly older contemporary, Harry Mulisch -- whose name always turns up on those mysterious annual short lists of Nobel Prize contenders so beloved of European literary journalists.

 Nooteboom is the sort of writer who can can describe Irish grass as "idiotically green" and observe that not knowing the language of the country in which a traveler finds himself turns him "into a very small child, a dog, or a foreigner -- for these three are none of them capable of understanding what you say." (The latter reaction came in a pub on the Aran Isles, where the author encountered his first native Irish speaker.)

The relatively short works here are not, in other words, pieces that slip easily into the conventional Anglo-American travel-writing genre. (That's part of what renders them rather mesmerizing.) Nor does it work to label them "travel sketches." Despite their brevity, these are deeply layered, richly allusive and -- in the best sense of the word -- demanding, wholly original pieces. Perhaps they best could be described as meditations on various destinations.

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