Cee Nooteboom, All chief parts Day...

Cee Nooteboom, All chief parts Day. Translated by Susan Massotty. recent York: Harcourt, 2001. 352pp $25 ISBN 0-15-100566-4

All principal parts Day, first published in Holland in 1998 and the latest of Cee Nooteboom's novels to be translated into English, takes a familiar line from the terminate of The Great Gatsby as an epigraph: "So we beat in succession boats against the current, borne ceaselessly into the past." Fitzgerald's lapidary melancholy stakes the tone of the novel that chases In it, the past is not purely "another country," as LP Hartley one time put it, but has sealed its