Travel: Dutch essayist, poet and award- winning novelist Cees Nooteboom is often cited as one of the writers-in-translation the English-speaking world should be reading more of. This new collection of travel writing reminds us why. His prose is both warm and sophisticated, instructive without being pedantic, bemused without being superior.
Nooteboom first voyaged as a sailor, earning his passage from Holland to South America, and has been travelling ever since. Nomad's Hotel contains essays written between 1971 and 2002, touching down in Africa, the Middle East and Inishmore, as well as Venice, Munich and Zurich.
Whatever their settings, these pieces are characterised by curiosity, humility, a melancholy nourished by the certainty of transience, and an oddly companionable anxiety that focuses on how much is lost to us every day: "When memory refuses to work it is as if the time in which that lost memory took place has never existed . . ."
The best pieces are those set in the most unfamiliar locations: Isfahan, Yazd and Shiraz, The Gambia, Morocco and Mali. Because Nooteboom thrives on inscrutability ("The semblance of a riddle always pleases me more than the fact of a solution"), it is in such places that he feels most acutely "the excitement of being foreign". It is also in these locations that he experiences one of the principal satisfactions of travel: the shedding of the self. This shedding is not an attempt to outrun the particulars of his own life (to those who have, over his many peripatetic years, accused him of travelling to escape himself, he points out that "on the contrary, I was the one who was always at home, namely with myself"). Rather it is an attempt to access something more elemental and universal than personal circumstance.
In Persepolis, he feels as though a reincarnated version of himself is wandering around "an untarnished universe of limited size, where an excess of questions gets thankfully smothered in legend".
At the edge of the Sahara, he notes: "Your masks do not count. As far as a Berber from Goulimine is concerned you could as easily be from Ohio, so that many of the nuances one has taken pains to cultivate no longer apply."
Nooteboom is fascinated by intensely focused individuals, and Tim Robinson - author of two books on Inishmore - is among those who have most fascinated him, not least because Robinson's 12-year stay on the island contrasts so starkly with Nooteboom's own nomadic existence. He credits Robinson with having, in his meticulous and multifaceted delineation of Inishmore, "thwarted the transience of one small part of the globe".
It is clear why Robinson's work so appeals to Nooteboom. Not only does it thwart transience; it reflects one of Nooteboom's own recurring themes: the desire to pay homage to "the complexity of the ground below each step you take". For Nooteboom, the ghosts of those who have walked a given spot of earth before him are omnipresent: the 50,000 previous occupants of his Barcelona hotel room; the Indians, Ethiopians, Medes, Greeks, who travelled to Persepolis, "all those lips spoke their lost languages"; even the safety instructions in the Ritz strike him as a palimpsest.
Nooteboom's wonderful novel, The Following Story, describes a group of people leaving a ship one by one, each after telling his or her own story, a scene I thought of when reading of his travelling companions disembarking in The Gambia:
We sit together for the last time in a sort of innocent melancholy. Lechinski . . . steps ashore at daybreak, his long hair flying in the morning breeze . . . Miss Peace Corps is next to leave. She threatens to break our hearts, for now we are able to see just where she will be spending those two years . . . The Danes and Swedes are picked up, the English couple are remaining on board. I am the only one with nowhere to go.
Thankfully, having nowhere to go was never Nooteboom's predicament.
Molly McCloskey's latest book is the novel, Protection, published by Penguin Ireland
Nomad's Hotel: Travels in Time and Space By Cees Nooteboom, translated by Ann Kelland Harvill Secker, 230pp. £16.99