Roads to Santiago

In De omweg naar Santiago another sort of balance has been achieved. Here Nooteboom is more than just an observer. He is an emphatic participant. As a result his book is more than just a useful handbook for tourists who want to see more than just Spain’s scorching East Coast, it can also be read as an extended self-portrait. Nooteboom prefers remote locations, the vast and little-visited regions outside the tourist areas. That might explain Nooteboom’s love: the traveller who is constantly going somewhere and is always on the move finds himself confronted with places where time has stood still for centuries, suddenly he feels as though he has come home. ‘It is always contemporaries who exaggerate the changes and the media reinforces their exaggeration because it has to sell change to survive, because constancy is not attractive. For that there are other media: museums, books, cathedrals.’

This book is a medium of the last category: with a rucksack full of erudition in history and art and with the mild melancholic tone that has become his trademark, the writer travels through a country and time and visits Madrid, León, Navarre, Castile and Santiago de Compostela. At the Trappist monastery in Oliva, Nooteboom admits that he himself once wanted to become a Trappist. The abbot in whom he confided his decision at that time gave him a Latin book of the life of Abelard and said: ‘Go and translate this. We’ll see about the rest when you’ve finished it.’ That was enough. But still, in many of these pieces, we hear the echo of his craving for the still, timeless life he sought long ago.