Letters To Poseidon

''I had been looking for someone to write to for a long time, but how does a man write letters to a god?''

From his Mediterranean garden on the island of Menorca, Cees Nooteboom writes to the trident-wielding deity, Poseidon, ''initiating a dialogue not only with the past,'' as Alberto Manguel observes in his Preface, ''but with an entire world that seemed lost for ever.''

Offering a seductive int...