All Souls Day Books

Arthur Daane is a documentary maker, a camera operator, and a lonely man. His wife and child, who died years earlier, haunt his waking life. He has a solid group of friends, a rag-tag trio of intellectuals who do their best to keep up his spirits, but as with all people suffering from the demons associated with the death of loved ones, their best can never be enough. So, he travels about Europe, working for commission when he needs the money, spending time on his personal project when he does not. He walks, he thinks, he remembers.

Soon, however, a new presence enters Arthur's life. She is Elik, a young Ph.D. student studying an obscure twelfth century Spanish queen. He is attracted to her mystery, she is attracted to his silence. A romance begins, one that is confusing to them both.

And that, in a nutshell, is the entire novel. Nooteboom writes at a leisurely pace, allowing Arthur to ponder all manner of philosophical and cultural problems. A walk for Arthur is not merely a walk - it is nearly an essay, with statues inspiring history, trees inspiring philosophy, dogs inspiring memory. Generally, Arthur's thought connections are interesting and relevant however, they often seem more padding than anything else.

The first hundred or so pages of the novel occupy themselves with Arthur's journey around Berlin, his current residence. While he walks, he remembers snippets of conversation with his friends Victor, Arno and Zenobia, these isolated items of character-building a prelude to a meeting at their favourite restaurant. Unfortunately, his three closest friends - the absent Erna notwithstanding - function more as mouthpieces for Nooteboom, rather than as characters in their own right. Conversations, when the occur, are punctuated with random facts that serve to link topics together, allowing the author to dazzle us with his varied and wide-ranging intellect. This is fine, except that Arthur's friends never progress beyond this fact-serving. They are stilted, because all they can be are repositories of knowledge. We are left to wonder why Arthur wants to be around them, and why they would want to be around him. A fine example comes from an early conversation between Arno and Victor:

'How on earth can you people call it cheese?'

'Luther, Hildegard von Bingen, Jakob Bohme, Novalis, and Heidegger have all eaten this cheese,' Arno said. 'The penetrating ordor that you smell is the German version of eternity. And the translucent substance that you see, with the dull sheen of candle wax, might very well represent the mystical heart of my beloved Vaterland.'

All very fine, but their conversations never progress beyond this babble of knowledge swapping. Are we expected to believe that there are people who talk like this? And if they have been eating at the same restaurant for years, surely Arno would not lambast the table with this nugget of information upon arriving at the cheese dish? It all smacks of a writer writing the scene, rather than people living in it. A shame, considering Nooteboom's obvious intelligence.

When the femme fatale, Elik, enters the story, the novel shifts focus. At first, we are led to believe that the plot will follow the ordinary, 'mysterious alluring woman' cliche, but it does not. No, almost immediately after Elik is introduced, we are allowed into her mind through a point-of-view section, and this dispels a large amount of her artificial mystery. A lesser novel would collapse once the shroud of the female has lifted, but if anything, All Souls' Day thrives. Elik and Arthur are dancers performing to a song they can't hear, with movements they don't know. We are led to believe that as confusing Arthur finds Elik, so to is Elik baffled by Arthur.

A large focus of the novel is the way history portrays us, and how we portray it. Elik immerses herself in a period of history that is so small, and so focused, that it is difficult for others to appreciate the reason for studying it in such detail. But isn't our own small slice of history just as irrelevant, ultimately? What claim can we have on the future, one hundred years from now, let alone a thousand? Coupled with these intriguing ideas comes the question of German guilt following World War II. Clearly, Berlin is a land steeped in history - some of it good, some of it not. Can we look at Hitler and the Holocaust as merely history? Nooteboom argues through his characters that we cannot, yet surely in a thousand years, that is exactly what scholars will be doing. How can we expect the future to be as affected as we are, on an event that to them, will have infinitely less relevance and impact? An unsettling idea, but one that is virtually unavoidable once presented.

There is beauty. A scene where Elik dances in an underground rave club, is moving in its horror. His description is note perfect, and shows clearly how someone away from that scene might interpret the clashing music: 'She seemed to know them, to assume a different voice, a kind of shout to be heard above the music, heavy metal, the sound of a factory producing nothing but noise, pounding figures on a dance floor, slave laborers working on an absent product, contorted bodies moving in time to a merciless beat, writhing with every lash of the whip, screaming along with what they seemed to recognise as words, a German chorus from Hell, raw voices scraped over jagged iron, poisonous metal.' This is, to my mind, a compelling interpretation of a chaotic scene. Other descriptions throughout are equally impressive, showing that when Nooteboom shifts out of pedagogic mode, he is more than capable of producing narrative gold.

Elik is an unsettling character. No, it is more than that - she is unpleasant. Even when we are allowed into her mind, it is difficult to sympathise. Yes, we appreciate her quest to learn all there is to know about Queen Urraca, but can we also appreciate her alternately hostile and baffling treatment of Arthur? We can't, and the novel suffers. We also cannot easily sympathise with Arthur's growing obsession, because of Nooteboom's intellectual distancing act. Because conversations as well as thoughts are so filled with information and philosophising that while interesting, adds little to the characters and indeed detracts from them, we just can't care enough about who is doing what and why.

I just finished reading this book and cannot recommend it enough. It is a sort of novel of ideas that encompasses traditional German philosophy as well as more modern issues. The story and characters are strong, and the portrayal of Berlin as an historical but ever-changing city is dead-on. This novel is longer than most of Nooteboom's others, but just as good a starting place if you're unfamiliar with his books.

This novel develops in a much slower, traditional way than Nooteboom's other novels but this slowness is appropriate for the subject matter. The strength of this novel is the incredible way Nooteboom through words, allows us to see the world as Arthur sees it - he processes visual images not words or logical formulations. We are drawn into his experience of verbal overload, of stumbling to say in words what is known in visual or aural images.

The second success of the novel is it's accurate portrayal of a specific intellectual time - Hegel, Camus, Volans, Pedereski, Hildegard ... it was so familar as to be eerie ... for the novel Berlin with Dutch, German, Russian individuals. And yet in some strange way the same as my college days in rural Wisconsin with students from Uganda, Honduras ... In some way Nooteboom has captured the intellectual life of an era and successfully made it universal.

Throughout the novel - verbally and by plot - the volume addresses the issue of history - personal, recent, and ancient. The juxtaposition of Arthur's visual record of history, of his friend's intellectual understanding and of his "girl friend's" archival search for history is effective at forcing the reader to think. Often this is done by small details - a statue that fallen still has a cap in place where a real cap would have fallen off, the timeless sound of conches in Japanese monasteries, the sound of tires on wet pavement ...

This is a novel that challenges the way you perceive the world rather than simply presenting the challenge that Arthur is facing. Arthur having lost wife and child in an airplane accident is forced to reevaluate his world. The novel says the rest of us should do so without a prod like Arthur's.

This is one of the best books on Day of the Dead that I have bought, it is well written and the photo's are excellent. I have many books on this subject but this is one of my favorites.

Excellent Documentary insight into the Mexican celebration of the dead. Very well done photojournalism and fine printing.

The Day of the DeadThe Day of the Dead / Dia De Los Muertos

This is a beautiful and interesting coffee table book. The celebration is happy, colorful and unusual. The text explains it in a well written, knowledgable manner. The pictures are expressive, telling a story of their own.

Chloe Sayer offers readers a journey through the Day of the Dead. Into the darkness she goes, illuminating the honoring of the dead with written tributes from poets and novelists, and artwork from Mexico's greatest artists and handicrafters. The living play a special role with the dead, honoring them each year for a few days to help energize their spirits. A compact, beautiful little book.

Good things come in small packages is very true with this little book. At under a hundred pages and able to fit in your palm this is the perfect companion to take anyplace, anytime, anywhere. I recommend finding this authoritve book that is filled with many delightful pictures. The color and historical black and white photographs are all excellent, worth the price of the book alone. Anyone interested in the Day of the Dead and how it is celebrated in Mexico should add this little gem to their collection. Colectors like myself, of calaveras will love the Posadas, sugar skulls, papier-mache and other decorative skulls included in the book. The color photographs are outstanding and very different from the usual fair found in most books on this subject. Some of the historical photgraphs are of the rarely seen family portraits with children that have passed from this world.There is even a series of color postcards inside but it seems to be waste to pull them out. The text is minimal but highly informative complete with poems by Aztec kings and Sor Juana Inez De La Cruz honoring the dead. Several observers of the Mexican Day of the Dead are featured most notably Sergei Eisensteini's thoughts and reflections when he made "Que Viva Mexico"! There is a scene in the movie depicting the Day of the Dead and Eisenstein's scribbled notes, a primitive story book written on stationary from his stay at the Hotel Regis in Mexico city is included. An excerpt from Octavio Paz's "Labyrinth of Solitude" rounds out a concise view of the Day of the Dead. All in all this is a fascinating look and read of the celebration of death celebrated in November that dates back to the pre-conquest time period. The author, Chloe Sawyer, has written numerous books on Mexico and Peru and has lectured throughtout the world and is a Fellow of the Royal Anthropoligical Institute.

"The Zigzag Way" is a short book, almost novella size, without a great deal of character development. It does have a shifting cast of characters unified by the willingness to change the familiar for something new, Em being the exception, and also the one character with no real connection to Mexico. At the end the protagonist, unlike his father, still has not found what that something new will be. For a slim book, there was an historical dimension which was valuable, but it almost seems like Desai was also seeking a spiritual experience in Mexico which turned out to be disappointing. The concluding scene has some emotional power, but just doesn't add up to anything really significant. While Desai can create fine metaphors, there were times I felt they were inserted when no metaphor was called for, so that they simply brought attention to themselves. On a personal note, I was better able to visualize Em because I had recently seen the movie "Kinky Boots", and pictured the fiancée.

Eric O'Brien is an uncertain and awkward young man, a would-be writer and a traveller in spite of himself. Happy to follow his more confident girlfriend Em to Mexico, he is overwhelmed with sensory overload and gradually seduced by the strangeness, the colour, the mysteries of an older world and its celebrations of the Dia de los Muertos. He finds himself in a curious quest for his own family in a ghost mining town, now barely inhabited, where almost a hundred years earlier young Cornish miners worked the rich seams in the earth. Until Pancho Villa and revolution came to Mexico.
A recording of this novel is available from BBC Audiobooks and Eleanor Bron's reading is truly breathtaking. Highly recommended.

Eric is drifting in his chosen career path, writing a book on immigration with the help of a grant, an extension of his thesis, daily losing focus, caught up in an aimless cycle of wasted days. His highly motivated girlfriend is another matter, focused and engaged in her own work, soon to travel to Yucatan for extensive research with her fellow scientists. Clinging to the relationship and his angst, an ambivalent Eric grabs the opportunity to travel to Mexico with Emily, certain that a change of scene will invigorate his sagging self-discipline and commitment to his project. When they arrive in Mexico, Eric is stunned by the color and beauty of the area, the unflinching brightness of the days a sharp contrast to his native Boston. With Emily soon to leave for the interior, Eric walks the streets of the city, drinking up local culture and attending lectures he cannot understand with his limited knowledge of Spanish.

Yet in one lecture the names of places stimulate his unconscious, releasing barely remembered stories told in his childhood in Cornwall, England, tales of mining in exotic places, of hardship, revolution and loss. With little to go on but the fragments of his grandfather's tales of life as a miner in Mexico, Eric learns, albeit tangentially, that his familial ties to the region have remained dormant all these years, waiting to be rediscovered in this time, in this place. Left to his own devices, Eric uncovers a legacy that changes his definition of himself and the direction of his life. As the annual celebration of the Day of the Day approaches, Eric struggles with what he has learned in the Sierra Madre and his connection to the enigmatic Dona Vera, the Australian wife of a mining baron, who holds the key to Eric's past.

Desai's prose is evocative, the shy and unobtrusive East Coast scholar contrasted with the brilliant local color and lore of the Sierra Madre, a subtle intimation of darker personal histories buried beneath the veneer of modern civilization, the past powerful in the words of the eccentric widow who speaks the mellifluous names of Eric's memory. Stories buried in stories, the layers of years mute the voices that would tell of brutality and injustice; with Eric as her unwitting vehicle, Desai uncovers a time of turmoil and violence where turn-of-the-century Cornwall meets the harsh world of mining under the impossibly blue skies of Mexico, where sacred peyote grows at the surface of the earth's rich ores, all made real on Dia de los Muertos. Luan Gaines/ 2006.

My reading has declined by 75% this past year for the lack of finding books like this one. I learned more about Mexico in 160 pages than in 4 visits there. The author has an incredible ability to focus with lightning pace on both the thrust of plot and smallest details, but never through use of excess words. We start in an East Coast college where a young guy follows his scientist girl friend to Mexico and as they separate for her to do her work, the young man goes deeper into the mountains of Mexico and almost loses himself in the history he trudges up in the pursuit of the story of his Mexican grandfather. Many readers will say, Oh Yuck! and ignore books like this, turning to another James Petterson re-hash. Too bad, but that's freedom.

THE ZIGZAG WAY by Anita Desai is a success in several ways, most notably in delivering to the reader a Mexico of vivid sights, sounds and smells. The feel of the place -- its mountains, animals, flowers, foods -- is captured with a keen eye (and ear, and nose). Secondly, the structure, going back and forth in time and making connections along the way, is irresistible. Where she has not succeeded so well is in creating characters that achieve verisimilitude. The sometimes stilted dialogue doesn't help. And the story itself, for all its exoticism, doesn't rise much beyond the mundane. Still, THE ZIGZAG WAY is a quick, entertaining read worthly of a recommendation, though not an emphatic one.

This book is beautiful and peaceful. My children have read it over and over - the words are fun to read as an adult and the children love the way Felipa thinks and tries to solve her concerns. Felipa as a child character is smart, thoughtful, proactive and sentimental. After being a regular storytime book, we used this book when a family member died a few months ago as a way to make our children see that those we love are always with us. Peruvian culture that is represented in this book is subtle and respectful. I recommend this book.

This children's book tells the story of Felipa, who lives high up in the Andes Mountains. After her grandmother dies, she looks for her soul everywhere. She wanders so far away, her father has to come find her in a field. Her father assures her that her grandmother's soul will come to her on Día de los Muertos. Felipa waits eagerly for November to arrive, and celebrates the holiday, and says goodbye to her grandmother until next year. This book has a simple explanation of the holiday for younger readers for them to understand and be able to read on their own. It's illustrations are expressive, interesting, and provide much visual stimulation. This book doesn't get into too many details of the customs associated with Día de los Muertos, but is a good introduction.

I loved this book, it really captures the spirit of the holiday as celebrated in Latin America through the eyes of a child. The paintings are gorgeous and it has a great ending.

this was a pretty good book. however, i am not too interested in the mexican war, so i was not very interested in some parts of the story line, but if u r interested in the mexican war, this book is definetly 4 u!

I must say that I didn't really understand this story until I read the description of the Day of the Dead on the last two pages of the book. When I reread the story knowing the background of this Mexican belief, I was able to better enjoy the story for what it was. The author/illustrator throws weird words together such as, "Buenos noches, story time, shiver-jitter, gee" and illustrates them with expressive lively skeletons. Young children would probably like the sounds of the silly words on each page, but I didn't. I did appreciate the small amount of education I received about this holiday, again from the last two pages, about the dead loving the lives they had, kids included. If you decide to purchase this book, read and understand the concepts, truths and beliefs on these last two informative pages so that you and the child you read it to/with can understand this tradition.

My 3 1/2 year old found this at the library and was very excited by the cover: "Mommy, can we get this skeleton book?" I, being a former goth-y 80's metalhead, encourage the love of the macabre in my young children, strange as it may seem, so we took it home and both my daughters LOVED reading it and looking at the colorful illustrations, but especially my younger one (who found it). We read it over and over again, and she had EVERY word memorized by the 3rd day. I knew returning it to the library would be a problem, so I ordered it from Amazon so she would have her own copy. The cutest thing is listening to her say the Spanish words in the text. At the end, she yells out "El Dia de los Muertos!" and claps her hands. I can't say that EVERY kid would love it, but mine definitely do, and I love reading it with them.

This children's book tells the Día de los Muertos story through the eyes of bilingual Sacramento, California-based twins, aged ten, named Ximena and Azucena. The book tells the family history to illustrate the strong ties between the American family and its native Mexico. In 1974, the twin's father was an integral part of bringing Día de los Muertos to Sacramento. This book gives a very detailed history of Día de los Muertos that I didn't come across in any other children's books. It explains much of Aztec culture, including their Creation Myth, and how Día de los Muertos began. Then, Spanish conquistadors came into contact with these people, and their Catholic influence altered their traditions, and Halloween was beginning to brew in Europe simultaneously. Finally, it discusses how Mexican-Americans have another unique take on celebrating the holiday. Then, the book outlines the celebration, many pages on the ofrendas (with more elaborate detail than other books in this bibliography) a section on the masks of Día de los Muertos (another facet of the fiesta that isn't covered in other books), and the procession a family takes from its home to the cemetery. It also contains a glossary of the Spanish words used throughout the book with its definition.

This novel, written in 1997, could not be read at a better time. Just as the US keeps sliding in to military adventures today, All Soul's Day presents an exciting fictional tour of how the Vietnam tragedy developed. As their Government is slipping and sliding into a political involvement that can only be described criminal, the stories characters try to make a stand against what they know is wrong. Bill Morris writes as if he has actually lived through the events he portraits and the line between fact and fiction emerges as a truley thin one. As patriotism and exile go hand in hand in this story, Morris provides his US readers with plenty of food for thought. May they be able to connect the dots.

This man is simply inadequate to the telling of this tale. The material is there, god know's it is, but in the hands of this writer it amounts to something less than nothing. To take matters of such central value to the culture and render them silly, faint and pretentious is to do less than nothing. The prime question is whether to feel worse at the wasting of the epic material or over the sloppy lunk-headed prose. This fella is clumsy but, it would seem, convinced that his clumsiness is actually a form of brilliance. May I suggest a semester at JUCO?

Although this book is recommended for young children and has an elementary feel to the illustrations, it places too much emphasis on death for elementary school children. I was particularly uncomfortable with the almost preachy way it tells us that we should be grateful to be alive. The book contains facts that may be better suited for older children, but it is written in simple language meant for young children.