Cees Nooteboom

A song of truth and semblance

Penguin Books, softcover.

Interweaving two fictions, two realities, Cees Nooteboom, one of Holland's finest living writers, explores life and art with a mean and brilliant metaphysical wit.
Two writers meet in an Amsterdam arts club, drink wine, skirt nervously around any talk of their own work and argue about the nature of fiction. For one of them, a floating pair of epaulettes is on the point of fleshing into Georgiev, a nineteenth-century Bulgarian colonel. The banal and irritating phrase 'the
colonel falls in love with the doctor's wife' itches at the back of his mind ...
As the stories of the writer and his characters weave through each other, the lustrous love­triangle of fiction gradually gathers more fire, more vitality and disquieting truth.