Nooteboom, Cees

Baton Rogue. 1984. Louisiana State University Press. 1st American Edition. Very Good in Dustjacket. 0807111767. Translated from the Dutch by Adrienne Dixon. 83 pages. hardcover. keywords: Literature Translated Dutch . FROM THE PUBLISHER - An interweaving of two fictions, two realities, A SONG OF TRUTH AND SEMBLANCE is both a meditation on the mysteries of time and space and a story of the simple longings of the human heart. Peering beneath the conventions and reassurances that structure our lives and our literature, Cees Nooteboom writes of the odd insubstantiality of what we accept as the real world and of the equally disquieting reality of the fictions that are born in the coils of a writer's mind. The complex, elusive vision of this novel is woven around the lives and thoughts of six characters, two of them writers engaged in an uneasy debate over the nature of their craft, and a third their publisher. The other characters begin their existence in the imagination of one of the writers, evolving from a pair of epaulettes and a stethoscope into Lyuben Grigoriev, a colonel, and Stefan Ficev, an army doctor, both living in the Bulgaria of 1879 and locked in a cordial but often heated argument over the glory of their nation's hard struggle for independence. A third element, a simple phrase, appears in the writer's mind alongside the epaulettes and the stethoscope - ‘the colonel falls in love with the doctor's wife' - and soon Laura Ficev, ethereal and somehow modern, alters the terms of the Bulgarians' friendly conflict. As the Bulgarians take on more and more reality in the writer's imagination - revealing their individual passions, prejudices, life histories - they begin to overshadow his own life. The impassioned argument between the colonel and the doctor has a seriousness and honesty missing from the literary debate of the two writers. The contest of the two nineteenth-century men for the same woman has a drama whose nearest echo in the lives of the two writers is their blandly professional relationship with the publisher. inventory #5492 ISBN: 0807111767.