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From "one of the greatest modern novelists" comes a haunting tale of angels, art, and modern love (A. S. Byatt).
In Lost Paradise, Cees Nooteboom sets out to connect two seemingly unrelated strangers whom he has glimpsed on his travels, and to explore the major impact that small interactions can have on the course of our journeys.
A beautiful woman aboard a Berlin-bound flight becomes Alma, a young lady who leaves her parents' São Paulo home on a hot summer night in a fit of depression. Her car engine dies in one of the city's most dangerous favelas, a mob surrounds her, and she is pulled from the automobile.
To escape her memory of the assault, she flees across the world, to Australia, where she becomes involved in the beautiful but bizarre Angel Project. Not long after, Dutch literary critic Erik Zontag is in Perth, Australia, for a conference. He has found a winged woman curled up in a closet in an empty house. He reaches out, and for a second allows his fingertips to brush her feathers—and then she speaks. The intersection of their paths illuminates the extraordinary coincidences that propel our lives.
"Dreamy and self-conscious . . . [Nooteboom] brazenly explores notions of reinvention, healing, loss, and the divine." —Tom Barbash, The New York Times Book Review
A Washington Post Book World 100 Best Books of 2007
“Elegant, subtle intelligence . . . cool, intellectually sophisticated, ironic . . . Nooteboom is a careful prose stylist of a notably philosophical bent.” —J.M. Coetzee, New York Review of Books
“Dreamy and self-conscious . . . Nooteboom [is] a cerebral, experimental writer renowned in his native Netherlands (indeed throughout Europe) and consistently on the short list of Nobel Prize candidates. . . . he brazenly explores notions of reinvention, healing, loss, and the divine.” —Tom Barbash, The New York Times Book Review
“A writer of whimsical, cerebral, postmodern fables, not unlike Calvino, Nabokov, or Milan Kundera. . . . [Lost Paradise is] a wry portrait of two ruined civilizations meeting and perhaps creating something new . . . a small, oddly beautiful work of art.” —Jess Row, Slate
“This dreamy, philosophical novel can be read in one sitting, but its images (a winged woman curled up in a bare cupboard) and its funny, profound meditations on fate (‘life . . . is the stupidest of culinary experiments’) will haunt you much longer. A-.” —Hannah Tucker, Entertainment Weekly
“Hypnotic . . . dream-like . . . Nooteboom’s characters are gripping, his dialogue humorous and his narrative brimming with musings about identity and redemption. His genius, however, is his seamless integration of contemporary, mythic and historic images. . . . He embeds philosophical musings in observations of the commonplace, so that his ideas sneak up on you, appearing unexpectedly, breathtakingly, like angels hidden in abandoned cupboards.” —Jennifer Vanderbes, The Washington Post
“Vividly drawn passages of great beauty . . . [Nooteboom’s] characters here reference such authors as the late, great Austrian cynic Thomas Bernhard and imaginative Italian luminary Italo Calvino, and it’s within that collision between the grim and the playful that Nooteboom’s own voice can most often be found. . . . In his many little books detailing massive journeys (both literal and figurative), Nooteboom often manages to give readers the same.” —Eric Allen Hatch, Metro Times Detroit
“A fine book, eloquent, masterfully crafted, with engaging characters and events. It tickles at grand ideas as well as shallow modern living. You could easily find yourself returning to Lost Paradise from time to time.” —Linda Crosson, The Dallas Morning News
“Eminent Dutch novelist Nooteboom (All Soul’s Day) weaves an imaginative tale of redemption from the intersecting lives of travelers. . . . Framed by masterful reflections on misunderstandings in life and literature, Nooteboom’s short work, at once delicate and chiseled, achieves a dreamlike suspension of time and place.” —Publishers Weekly
“An astonishing tale of a beautiful art student seeking her soul in Australia’s outback . . . a masterpiece by visionary Dutchman Nooteboom . . . Luminous. Numinous. Glorious.” —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
“A brief, sweet book, rich with dreaming and gentle philosophizing . . . a remarkably gossamer thread . . . dreamy, grainy-film-like . . . suspended in time and just outside of the concrete world.” —Lucia Silva, bookbrowse.com
“Lost Paradise completes the second half of an orbit achieved by its mirrored opposite, Milton’s Paradise Lost . . . luminous . . . refreshed yet tragic . . . a delight, filled with sparkling sentences, an aura of wonder, and a great story-teller’s facility.” —Ron Slate, ronslate.com
“An antipodean treatment of Milton’s epic poem in both title and geography. . . . [Nooteboom’s] diction is straightforward and efficient in the way of the Dutch, but his plot bobs and weaves like a philosophical riddle, challenging the intellect to recognize truths that are typically only acknowledged on the level of the soul. The parallels Nooteboom draws are impressive; it’s no small feat to relate longing and the cosmos to sanitoriums and Australian aborigines, no matter how much James Joyce one might have read in college.” —Tiffany Lee-Youngren, The San Diego Union-Tribune
“Dense, layered, magical and innovative . . . Nooteboom is an original, a European thinker preoccupied by the strangeness of life in all its multiple ambiguity, from the now to a poem by Ovid. His books are explorations, tiny bombs capable of exploding the imagination of any reader open to adventure. His prose is exact and his observations invariably epigrammatic and always telling. Above all, he has no interest in rules and he certainly does not abide by them. . . . Anyone interested in European writing, or simply in writing, should, or rather, must engage with Nooteboom’s imaginative intellectualism.” —Eileen Battersby, The Irish Times
Born in The Hague, Cees Nooteboom (1933-2026) was one of Holland’s most renowned authors, and had received a German Order of Merit and the Aristeon European Literary Prize, among others.