In a corner of the Schilderswijk there is a street bookcase, the outside of which is also readable: the maker has covered it with tear-off book pages. It’s in a corner inside The knight has diedthe second novel by a man born ninety years ago in The Hague: Cees Nooteboom.
It is even the first edition, hardcover, from 1963, but before anyone has any antiquarian illusions: the sixty years have not left this knight in the cold. The dust jacket is missing, the pages are loose in a discolored pale purple binding. What can be seen is that two eyes, a nose and a mouth are painted in light relief on the front. If you look up the original cover online, the relief appears to be a reflection of the face that was in front.
This doubling is no coincidence, as it turns out. In the novel, the narrator tries to make a reconstruction of the book that his deceased friend, the writer Anton Steenkamp, wanted to make, based on a collection of incoherent notes. “His book was going to be a book about a writer who died. Another writer finishes the book of the deceased.” Nooteboom himself mentions the inevitable Droste can, while we are still on the first page.
So we plunge into the mid-1960s and the literary discomfort with classical realistic storytelling in what Nooteboom’s narrator calls “sweet old-fashioned novels”. The knight has died indeed breathes a longing for a new kind of novel, a higher honey that entails a certain crumbliness in the practice of the story.
That story takes place on a Spanish island where Ibiza can be recognized without much difficulty; the Ibiza long before the invasion by the dance scene that now causes the island to vibrate in the Mediterranean at 290 beats per minute on some summer days. Here it is only northern artist types who come to disturb the peace, get stuffed dirt cheap, see ghosts and ramble across the bewildered island in taxis. Quite annoying people too, who treat the main character so unkindly that they become a kind of… Veronica Inside seem to be on tour.
But what The knight has died is also and above all a testimony to Nooteboom’s love for Spain. (He still lives two islands away, on Menorca, for part of the year.) It is still young love here, which can also be seen in the small sins against Spanish grammar that the thirty-year-old writer occasionally commits.
He wonderfully shows how a Dutchman tries to relate to everything Spanish that surrounds him: from the beautiful nature, the desirable Clara and the village bar to the crucifix in his room: “Above the bed that is a ship on a sea of red tiles hangs a Jesus who can no longer tolerate the pain and demonstrates this with a vulgarly contorted face. He hangs his handkerchief over it and says ‘horrible man’.”
Equally beautiful is Nooteboom’s description of a funeral procession, where the mourning thins out the further back you look in the procession. In the front the deep sadness, in the tail the chatting boys with their hands in their pockets. Nooteboom later wrote a lot about Spain, but rarely with the awkward sense of wonder The knight has died.
Would you like to have the reviewed copy The Knight Has Died? Send an email to boekuitdekast@ nrc.nl; the book will be raffled among entrants and the winner will be notified.