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A Song of Truth and Semblance book cover
A Song of Truth and Semblance
1981
First Published
3.59
Average Rating
95
Number of Pages

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 love-triangle of fiction gradually gathers more fire, more vitality and disquieting truth.

Avg Rating
3.59
Number of Ratings
348
5 STARS
16%
4 STARS
39%
3 STARS
36%
2 STARS
8%
1 STARS
2%
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Author

Cees Nooteboom
Cees Nooteboom
Author · 26 books

Cees Nooteboom (born Cornelis Johannes Jacobus Maria Nooteboom, 31 July 1933, in the Hague) is a Dutch author. He has won the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, the P.C. Hooft Award, the Pegasus Prize, the Ferdinand Bordewijk Prijs for Rituelen, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the Constantijn Huygens Prize, and has frequently been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature. His works include Rituelen (Rituals, 1980); Een lied van schijn en wezen (A Song of Truth and Semblance, 1981); Berlijnse notities (Berlin Notes, 1990); Het volgende verhaal (The Following Story, 1991); Allerzielen (All Souls' Day, 1998) and Paradijs verloren (Paradise Lost, 2004). (Het volgende verhaal won him the Aristeion Prize in 1993.) In 2005 he published "De slapende goden | Sueños y otras mentiras", with lithographs by Jürgen Partenheimer.

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