Excerpt from Lost Paradise by Cees Nooteboom, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

I am here to exorcise a demon; he is here to have sex with me. Or so I assume. In any case that is what we have done. A week, he said, not longer. Then he has to go back to his mob. His mob, his clan – that is how they refer to it here. But he hasn’t told me where his mob is. Somewhere in the outback, somewhere in this country’s endless space. I have no idea what is going through his mind. Maybe he is also deceiving me. Can someone lie who scarcely says a word?

He is asleep, and when he’s asleep, he is time itself. These are the oldest people on earth, and they have lived in this country for at least forty thousand years. You can’t get any closer to eternity than that. I went for a drive one night in São Paulo and ended up here. Not exactly, but that is how I think of it. I shouldn’t be thinking such things, but no one can forbid me to think them. I stare at the man asleep beside me. As young as he is, he looks as though he has lived a thousand years. He is lying on the ground, curled up like an animal. When he opens his eyes, he is as old as the rocks, as old as the lizards you see in the desert, although he wears his age lightly because he moves lightly, as if he cannot feel the weight of his body. I tell myself that this is as big a lie as the other one, but that’s not true. I have become involved in something I have no control over, because my time here does not count. Every once in a while, when he and I are out in the desert – in a country that consists almost entirely of desert – when he points out things that I have failed to see, when he all but becomes the land itself and knows where to find water in places I would never be able to find it, when I feel humbled in the face of his immeasurable age, which allows him to see food where I see sand, then I think – against my better judgement – that I left my house that night in order to arrive at this place. I left the heaviness of the tropics, where all is motion and noise, to arrive at this stillness.

Lost Paradise © 2004 by Cees Nooteboom, English Translation copyright © 2007 by Susan Massotty, and reprinted with permission of Grove Press, and imprint of Grove/Atlantic, Inc.