≡ PDF Rituals Harvest Book Cees Nooteboom 9780156003940 Books

Rituals Harvest Book Cees Nooteboom 9780156003940 Books

Download As PDF : Rituals Harvest Book Cees Nooteboom 9780156003940 Books

Rituals Harvest Book Cees Nooteboom 9780156003940 Books

I don't really know what to think about this short novel.

The three main characters seem to have such different lives.

Inni Wintrop, a poor boy from a rich Catholic family, inherits from his aunt a substantial sum that should have rightfully gone to his father. This allows him to drift through life, investing in stocks and seducing women. The book is divided into sections so we are allowed to see Inni in his 30's almost commit suicide when his wife leaves him for an Italian magazine photographer. But we are also allowed to see Inni in his 20's seducing and seduced by a serving girl and then in his 40's seducing and seduced by a girl he meets in a city park over a dead dove. These casual sexual encounters, along with dialogue with learned friends and art dealers, and checking in with this stock brokers seem to make up the ritual of Inni's life. His one strength is that he is captive of only a few compulsions and he whereas he is no great humanitarian or egoist, he at least does not hate mankind as does Arnold Taads or hate himself as does Philip Taads.

Arnold Taads is an outdoorsman, world traveler, skier, mountain climber, philosopher, and hater of his fellow human beings. Though he twice refers to Spinoza, Taads' can not be said to follow Spinoza's philosophy. Taads has made nature his God and thus humanity becomes Evil. His dislike for humanity thus infects his own self perception and he eventually dies of exposure to snow, which appears to really be a suicide. Arnold seems obsessed with time and schedule, organizing his life around his physical and intellectual activities and his dog rather than human interactions.

Then, 20 years later, we are introduced to an Indonesian man who is Arnold Taat's son with an Indonesian woman. Phillip Taats also has removed himself from humanity, exploring the contemplative life of a Zen monk in his barren apartment. Phillip has studied the great raku artists who developed vessels for the tea ceremony. He eventually buys a rare and beautiful vessel and performs a tea ceremony for his friend who owns an Asian antiquity gallery and for Immi. We then learn that Philip has committed suicide by drowning himself. When Bernard Roozenboom and Immi Wintrop enter his apartment, they find the vessel has been shattered.

What in the world does all this mean, you may ask? For me this small parable has to do with connectedness to the human condition and the search for meaning. Both Arnold and Philip have divorced themselves from human interaction and particularly human commitment. They seek meaning in solitude, God exists in nature and esthetics but not in the human condition (where I personally think God resides).

Well then, who is Immi? He is a driftless soul with no external reason for existance other than to make love to women and spend his inheritance, yet he has one charm, one grace, one protection against the void - Immi is open to possibility and relationship. He hangs by a thread but he still survives.


Tags : Rituals (Harvest Book) [Cees Nooteboom] on Amazon.com. *FREE* shipping on qualifying offers. <div>An intelligent, incisive (Washington Post) parable about order and chaos by one of the greatest modern novelists (A. S. Byatt),Cees Nooteboom,Rituals (Harvest Book),Harvest Books,0156003945,Fiction,Fiction - General,Fiction General,General,General & Literary Fiction,Modern fiction

Rituals Harvest Book Cees Nooteboom 9780156003940 Books Reviews

Too much undrerlining.
Unfortunately, there are many writers who have talent, but no subject to write about. So they turn to fashionable fads and the emptiness of life to create stories so absurd and pointless that the reader (unless he or she shares that same emptiness) leaves out totally... well, empty. The only reason I'm giving this book two stars is because, as I said, Noteboom can write, and because there are several clever and even bright sentences in the book. The subject seems to be the Death of God in modern life, and it is an interesting one, only the author should have written a philosophical essay instead of a narrative.

Inni Wintrop is a lonely man totally estranged from his family. One day an aunt arrives and introduces him to an ex-lover, a man also estranged from his family and from the world. This man has a very cheap, infantile, Greenpeace-like anti-human environmental "philosophy". This man has replaced God with Nature and a neurotical daily schedule. Years later, Inni meets the man's son, an Indonesian who pathetically follows each and every oriental New Age philosophy (until he commits suicide).

In the first chapter, entitled "Interlude", the author tells us the story of how Inni lost his wife, because he got to bed with other women and never paid any attention to her (strange, so, that she leaves him).

That's the book, disconnected clever musings about how God doesn't exist and how lonely we are in this cold world. No character is deep or likable in the least, there is no plot nor conflict nor anything but the repulsive contemplation of people with nothing to do but gaze at their navels and look for stupid rituals to supplant God. None of them even have real jobs.
This book gives you something to chew on on every level. The prose is good, (the English translation can not capture some of the idiosyncrasies of Dutch, but is very good overall) right from its opening sentence "The day Inni Wintrop committed suicide, Philips shares stood ..." All of the characters in the book are memorable and wonderfully sketched. (As an introverted person, I'm always amused by the walk through the woods scene. Taats asks Inni a question which spurs a two-page train of thought, but he answers only in a mono-syllable.) And it goes up to the structure of the book the first of the 3 parts is called "Intermezzo". Plenty of ideas here.
I don't really know what to think about this short novel.

The three main characters seem to have such different lives.

Inni Wintrop, a poor boy from a rich Catholic family, inherits from his aunt a substantial sum that should have rightfully gone to his father. This allows him to drift through life, investing in stocks and seducing women. The book is divided into sections so we are allowed to see Inni in his 30's almost commit suicide when his wife leaves him for an Italian magazine photographer. But we are also allowed to see Inni in his 20's seducing and seduced by a serving girl and then in his 40's seducing and seduced by a girl he meets in a city park over a dead dove. These casual sexual encounters, along with dialogue with learned friends and art dealers, and checking in with this stock brokers seem to make up the ritual of Inni's life. His one strength is that he is captive of only a few compulsions and he whereas he is no great humanitarian or egoist, he at least does not hate mankind as does Arnold Taads or hate himself as does Philip Taads.

Arnold Taads is an outdoorsman, world traveler, skier, mountain climber, philosopher, and hater of his fellow human beings. Though he twice refers to Spinoza, Taads' can not be said to follow Spinoza's philosophy. Taads has made nature his God and thus humanity becomes Evil. His dislike for humanity thus infects his own self perception and he eventually dies of exposure to snow, which appears to really be a suicide. Arnold seems obsessed with time and schedule, organizing his life around his physical and intellectual activities and his dog rather than human interactions.

Then, 20 years later, we are introduced to an Indonesian man who is Arnold Taat's son with an Indonesian woman. Phillip Taats also has removed himself from humanity, exploring the contemplative life of a Zen monk in his barren apartment. Phillip has studied the great raku artists who developed vessels for the tea ceremony. He eventually buys a rare and beautiful vessel and performs a tea ceremony for his friend who owns an Asian antiquity gallery and for Immi. We then learn that Philip has committed suicide by drowning himself. When Bernard Roozenboom and Immi Wintrop enter his apartment, they find the vessel has been shattered.

What in the world does all this mean, you may ask? For me this small parable has to do with connectedness to the human condition and the search for meaning. Both Arnold and Philip have divorced themselves from human interaction and particularly human commitment. They seek meaning in solitude, God exists in nature and esthetics but not in the human condition (where I personally think God resides).

Well then, who is Immi? He is a driftless soul with no external reason for existance other than to make love to women and spend his inheritance, yet he has one charm, one grace, one protection against the void - Immi is open to possibility and relationship. He hangs by a thread but he still survives.