The Foxes come at Night – Cees Nooteboom

Translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke

Nooteboom’s collection of short stories is permeated by a theme of death. Melancholic, perhaps, but not depressing. Death is used to highlight life, specifically the ethereal nature of a life preserved post-demise. Memories, photographs, chance sightings. While this meditation on life and death creates a fleeting series of ephemera, the style, direct, sometimes brutal, is in striking contrast to the subject manner.