Nomad's Hotel: Travels in Time and Space
One of the Netherlands’ foremost novelists (Lost Paradise, 2007), Nooteboom is also a notable travel writer (Roads to Santiago, 1997). This collection gathers journeys of the past 40 years to Ireland, Germany, Switzerland, Italy, West Africa, Iran, and Australia. In them, descriptive travelogue ranks second to considerations of the destinations as repositories of the past. Whether in Venice, Isfahan, or Timbuktu, Nooteboom sees a place through its physical relics and literary associations. The traveler’s innate foreignness, however well informed before arrival in a new place, burgeons with significance for Nooteboom. A traveler arrives, sees, and departs, not likely to return. While the philosophical musings coursing through Nooteboom’s pieces may not be to every travel reader’s taste, they are leavened by the kind of vicarious adventuring that is more to be expected in a travel book. Few ever visit Gambia, after all, but Nooteboom’s been there and elsewhere off the conventional path and will intrigue seekers of a reflective style in the travel genre, in particular.