i have seen critics allude to the double scansion of the realistic and the fantastic in the following story, but until james simpson mentioned it in the lift today i didn't really think about how this exists in in the dutch mountains too, even if the book is not in two explicit parts. i'm very glad he chose to read that as his second nooteboom, because i had just been starting to think about it again recently. as i browsed through it last night it came to me that however many times i reread in the dutch mountains i am each time taken anew with admiration for nooteboom. julian barnes called it elegant and beguiling, and a poet's fairy tale. i was once asked what the difference between a fairy tale and a poet's fairy tale is. i guess my answer is that on top of its more overt literariness (which is not to say fairy tales can't be literary - think of those of wilde, or the longer andersens!) there is that articulated astuteness and deliberate compactness, and, as always in the best passages of nooteboom, the masterly control of rhythm which progresses with a conversational logic that is deceptively simple but difficult to achieve.

i was going to write my elaine scarry paper on contrasting kinds of beauty in andersen's snow queen (icily regular, splendidly null!) and to enlist the paper cuttings of andersen (which surely demonstrate the beauty of symmetry (necessarily, since they have to be folded first!))on the side of the beauty of regularity and form, which is clearest in the mathematical perfection of the snow queen, the geometrical beauty of her snowflakes and the ice shards as jigsaw puzzle, and of course, the pursuit of perfect beauty through the pursuit of science and maths. or else something on the beauty of tales (the snow queen being a story in seven tales) which is so often criticised for two dimensionality or pan-determinism, but which shows, i think, that the superior beauty of forms (think of dinesen says the novel is an art form that is willing to sacrifice the story for the sake of the characters. rare criticism of the novel indeed.) in either case i was going to bring in nooteboom's in the dutch mountains as commentary on the snow queen, but now that i'm looking at the book again, i'm thinking i might just write my paper on the book itself, afterall. i had always read it before for the fairy tale criticism, and for metafictive observations, so that i had not thought of the explicit and controversial ideas of beauty in it. it's a pity nooteboom didn't do much with the idea i'm interested in in the snow queen, so that i can't write the paper the other way round, primarily on nooteboom and bringing in andersen as commentary. but i'll have to work on both a little more and see which way the paper ideas develop.