A European rule-breaker in Australia

Fiction:A writer sits on a plane watching a young woman. She may be about to begin reading a new book - at least, she is carefully unwrapping a slim volume.

It may even have been written by him, so he is as interested in the book as he is in the woman who has not even glanced at him. Elsewhere, two young Brazilian girls, friends since childhood, are setting off for adventure as well as escape, as one of them, Alma, has survived a gang rape.

But Alma is not defeated and she offers some personal history. "We laugh at the funny accents of our grandfathers, who came to Brazil after the war and never want to talk about their pasts. Even though they are constantly homesick, they have never been back to the Heimat.

"They weep and wail along with Fischer-Dieskau and the Kindertotenlieder. They want Germany to win the World Cup. But they don't want to talk about the war, just as our fathers didn't want to learn German either."

The dense, layered, magical and innovative fictions of Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, who was born in 1933, are always different. Whatever about the ghosts of Calvino and Nabokov, who tend to sit in on the journey, 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.

His elegiac meditation, The Following Story (1991, English translation 1993), for all its humour, makes beguiling use of the enduring pain of memory. An awareness of disillusionment as a near physical sensation offers a wide range of possibilities as does the split narrative. The Following Story is dominated by the personality of a narrator intent on telling his own story, despite the fact he is also reporting on the lives of others - or is he? This is the allure of Nooteboom. Nothing is certain.

Lost Paradise could as easily be titled "Paradise Lost". A team of angels is present, even if they are only freelance actors recruited to pose as angels at an event coinciding with a literary festival in Perth. Lines from Milton's masterwork run through the book in a text that abounds with the symbols, clues and red herrings so beloved by Nooteboom. The Brazilian girls arrive in Australia and become involved in the visual arts scene. This allows Nooteboom to consider the great Aboriginal myth of creation, the songlines once so brilliantly explored by Bruce Chatwin, and beyond to the Sickness Dreaming Place. The Australian travel sequences in Lost Paradise are superb, elegant and vivid - but then Nooteboom is also an accomplished travel writer. He has fun with this in the character of Dr Strabo, the disgruntled author of travel guides in The Following Story, who sees himself as a crusader of sorts, looked to by his countrymen as the ultimate authority on the world existing beyond the Netherlands.

ALMA DEVELOPS INTO the abiding consciousness of the book. Her observations move beyond the self, herself, and look to Aboriginal history and art. Erik Zondag is far more self-centred. The writer's commentary is more concerned with his predicament - an ageing man, employed to write book reviews when not dealing with his sarcastic girlfriend, who is 18 years younger and no longer besotted with him. She has despatched him to an Austrian spa for a cure or, more importantly, a changed attitude. This all happens on a slightly different time scale, some three years later, than the Australian odyssey.

But don't worry, Nooteboom is like that - time is a concept to be played with. Strict chronology, like conventional narrative, is too pedestrian for him.

It is Alma who decides "some people are actually transparent". When looking at Aboriginal art, she begins to also see the landscape. Australia emerges as immense, a space in which the Aborigines live at the centre, while the farmers claim the outer edges.

"At first the ground was hard and rutted, making the car bounce all over the road, then it turned sandy and slippery. The rivers shown on the map were dry beds. And everywhere we went there were vicious gnats. I try to imagine barefooted people walking through that unbounded emptiness but I cannot."

A white man who has spent 50 years observing the Aboriginals tells Alma about a painter who was killed by a jealous son-in-law. "I thought they were living in paradise, but I was wrong. It wasn't there either. He made beautiful things . . . The fact that his work was exhibited in museums in America was of little interest to him. Nor did he feel like explaining the iconography . . . "

IN 1980 NOTEBOOM'S Rituals was published, in which Inni Wintrop - "one of those people who drag the time they have spent on earth behind them like an amorphous mass" - lives a life of such measured sensitivities that he is at best barely alive. So why be surprised when he decides to obey a magazine horoscope - which he wrote - and attempts suicide. Nooteboom loves gags, philosophy, literary asides. He questions the business of writing, and of living itself. Yet for all the stylish doubt there is also belief. Erik recalls a cafe, "the type of place in which Thomas Bernhard would have sat and read his newspaper. Erik liked Thomas Bernhard, not only because, like the Dutch author WF Hermans, he had perfected the art of ranting and raving, but because, also like Hermans, his anger seemed to stem from an embittered, disappointed love."

Observations such as that, and so many others like it, explain why anyone interested in European writing, or simply in writing, should, or rather, must engage with Nooteboom's imaginative intellectualism.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Lost Paradise By Cees Nooteboom Translated by Susan Massotty Harvill Secker, 151pp. £14.99