Următoarea poveste

by Cees Nooteboom, Gheorghe Nicolaescu (Translator)

Te poţi afla în trei locuri deodată, fără a fi descoperit secretul ubicuităţii? Pentru Cees Nooteboom, acest olandez zburător al romanului contemporan, se poate. „Următoarea poveste”, acest microroman care i-a adus în 1993 Premiul European pentru Literatură, reuneşte călătoria în timp şi în spaţiu într-o aventură unică în care viaţa, visul şi presimţirea morţii nu mai pot fi deosebite. Cartea condensează experienţe personale ale autorului şi aluzii literare, cu un umor care face suportabilă până şi iminenţa dezastrului.

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Dutch Literature, Novels, Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Philosophy

112 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1991

About the author

Cees Nooteboom (born Cornelis Johannes Jacobus Maria Nooteboom, 31 July 1933, in the Hague) is a Dutch author. He has won the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren, the P.C. Hooft Award, the Pegasus Prize, the Ferdinand Bordewijk Prijs for Rituelen, the Austrian State Prize for European Literature and the Constantijn Huygens Prize, and has frequently been mentioned as a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature.

His works include Rituelen (Rituals, 1980); Een lied van schijn en wezen (A Song of Truth and Semblance, 1981); Berlijnse notities (Berlin Notes, 1990); Het volgende verhaal (The Following Story, 1991); Allerzielen (All Souls' Day, 1998) and Paradijs verloren (Paradise Lost, 2004). (Het volgende verhaal won him the Aristeion Prize in 1993.) In 2005 he published "De slapende goden | Sueños y otras mentiras", with lithographs by Jürgen Partenheimer.

Reviews

[Gaurav Sagar · Rating 4 out of 5]

"There is nothing to express, nothing with which to express, no power to express, no desire to express, together with the obligation to express".

-Samuel Beckett


Who am I, What I do?


The entire history of humankind could be summed up by our inquisitiveness towards our existence- 'the very question that what does it means to be'. The incessant inquiry of humankind rests upon the mystery of our existence and when we traverse the enigmatic road towards it, the profound questions of nothingness and death come along. As we know that death has been one of most profound mysteries which haunt humankind since the dawn of civilization, our restless and disquiet mind always keep prodding about what actually death means and what lies beyond it, if there is anything. We have seen that the greatest literature humankind has produced often revolves around these themes or the questions about our existence, however, the route taken to these eternal questions may vary.


The route taken by Cees Nooteboom towards the immortal and perpetual inquiry of what lies at the core of humanity, or what does it mean to 'being human', is certainly not traversed often, for the scrutiny of Nooteboom remains somewhere on the fringes of different investigations probable for such an inquiry essential to our existence. That does not necessarily mean that he lacks the depth required to explore such delicate and complex subjects, for the inquest and the probe of Nooteboom dances pleasantly among the domains of philosophical inquiry, fable, fantasy or perhaps a ghost story, however, it may appear more to be a metaphysical detective story, at least at the outset but the author of the caliber of Nooteboom may well prove you wrong.


A question often disturbs us that what is to write when so much has already been written? And why do we keep on reading new authors when what they want to say to us, probably has already been said? Perhaps to demystify the haunting enigma of our existence, we keep on reading- to immerse ourselves in a new soup of nothingness which may help us to comprehend our being. And perhaps that’s exactly we keep on writing despite so much have been already written- so swim in the eternal sea of nihilism for finding ourselves. The Following Story explores the problem of 'being and nothingness' through the contradictions of humanities and life sciences and does inquire it from both perspectives that whether we live psychological lives or mythical. It touches upon the importance of art plays in our life and how art could have been influenced through our technological advances, had they appear earlier.


To find words to give voice to one’s thoughts, at times, how difficult it may appear to be, but then we have authors like Cees Nooteboom who writes effortlessly juggling between various (so-called) genres of the literature, and perhaps that speaks volumes about his ability that his fictions can’t restricted to our known and limited understanding of the literature and the human existence for that matter. Reading Nooteboom is like encountering literary clues which are infused through inter-textuality in the prose, and which require you to immerse yourself actively in the prose to place those clues orderly to comprehend the entire enigma or at least you think so. It is like encountering the deep recesses of our own memory, where we found our own fears, confusions, regrets, griefs and dissolving and vaporizing moments of joys, and that’s a hallmark of a great literature which may you to reflect upon your own life.


We find Herman Mussert, a former teacher of classic languages- Latin and Greek, confusedly waking up in a hotel room of Lisbon though he is certain he slept in his Amsterdam home the previous night. What follows is a deep meditation on various themes concerned with human existence, while operating smoothly by switching between present and past, and perhaps life and death. He muses over his life through his memories, which are perhaps the only residues of his existence he is left with, that take us through a complex and ambiguous affair with a married woman, Maria Zeinstra; student who could be his most prized and gifted one, Lisa D’India who incidentally becomes the lover of Maria’ s husband, Arend Herfst.




link: source


Cees Nooteboom juggles among various narratives to weave a dream-like surreal prose wherein Mussert finds himself amidst the quadrangle of love while coping up with his teaching life of classic literature wherein he relates more with the characters of those pieces of classical literature than with the human beings, as if humans are just projections of psychological beings, we actually may be. Unfortunately, he has to give up the life of the teacher to imbibe a life of travel writer- Dr. Strabo. However, the paradigm in his professional life, which also affects a paramount and significant change in his personal life as well, could not stop his fascination with classical literature. He thinks himself to be the Socrates born in the modern era which provides his haunting soul some sort of solace, while teaching he gets transformed into the characters he reads as if like he goes through Ovid’s Metamorphoses to become someone or something else like the protagonist of Kafka’ s Metamorphosis.


The protagonist, Mussert takes us through his endless sojourn to find out who is he, a man lying in Amsterdam and dreaming about Lisbon and or vice-versa and what more, there could be other versions as well, as he muses upon his trip on a ship travelling towards Amazonia. It makes us question which version of us could be real? How many versions could there be? Is it possible that we could be someone else, and how many possibilities exist out there and out of those are we just one, incidentally, and what is so great about it? Random body with collections of random functions is required to be 'us'. The lucid, dream-like sojourn takes us to the core of philosophical inquiry of our existence by hopping through various versions of the protagonist through blending past and present, reality and fantasy, death and life, as if our existence is a fluid reality wherein these demarcations don’t matter.


The author infuses a dreamlike reality with a dream as good as reality wherein he contemplates upon various themes associated with human existence. It delves deep into core of our being and tantalizing remain on the boundary of fantastic tale and philosophical treatise, of course, with subtle twist and turns which are infused in the prose without exclamation marks. The enigmatic voyage he takes the reader on, traverses through the convoluted and intricate realms of memory, love, sexuality, language and our beliefs to put forth a exquisite tale of realism infused with fabulism to produce a existential inquiry of our 'being and nothingness.'




link: source


The poignant question asked by Nooteboom is that are we travelers in some sort of limbo, a kind of nothingness. Does beyond death there lies a space, like a limbo, where is there is no beginning, no end, no time, perhaps a sacred space of nothingness wherein our souls or consciousnesses keep striking each other, only to produce new versions of themselves, and perhpas the process goes on again and again ? Do people or souls, after they cease to exist enter this divine abode and reside there until they define themselves again out of the eternal sea of nothingness and exist again as new souls or consciousnesses with no memory of previous ones. The philosophical inquiry of the narrator further urges you to ponder upon the human existence, its (in)significance in the background of infinite reality and, of course, on the immortality of our soul. The role mythologies play in our lives can’t be downplayed; however, no mythology can have as many gods as there are stars in the space as they are unaware of what lies beyond them. Moreover, no mythology can stand the test of time, for how long they can survive in this eternal timelessness.


The author proposes that world is a never-ending cross-reference wherein it is not our soul which would set on a journey imagined by Socrates, rather it is our body that would embark on endless wanderings never to be ousted from the universe. It proposes a sort of Ovid’ s eternal Metamorphoses wherein the parts of our bodies transformed into something else over a period of time but remain part of this universe. As readers, we look for stories with clear beginnings and ends but the author here proposes an end which is not an end in itself, rather a beginning, it explores the multiple possibilities which may exist in ending or in the story itself. The reader realizes that the story starts where it ends and that's why called the following story and what remain of the soul or 'I' as we say is just a story, just like many other stories possible, at least for the time being. Perhaps, it symbolizes the eternal recurrence of universe wherein time repeat itself in an infinite loop, as if there is no beginning or end.


The Liquid I

[Glenn Russell · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anybody reading these words probably knows the Dutch poet and novelist Cees Nooteboom is one of the finest literary writers living in the world today. In the spirit of freshness, I would like to make several observations about this very short novel and the author in light of what nineteenth century German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer has to say about aesthetics and the art of the novel.

In the very first line, Herman Mussert, the narrator and main character, tells us, "I have never had an exaggerated interest in my own person, but unfortunately that did not imply I could stop thinking about myself at will, from one moment to the next." Indeed, Mussert is not interested in himself as a flesh-and-blood man of action; quite the opposite, he surrounds himself with books and reads all the time.

Within the first few pages, it becomes clear Mussert's world is the world of words. We read: "Words of polished marble drive out the most evil fumes." And to have such polish, Musset's words can't be the modern words ordinary people use in day-to-day conversation; rather, he goes on to tell us, "Our modern languages are altogether too wordy, look at any bilingual edition: on the left the spare, measured Latin phrases, the sculptured lines, on the right the full page, the traffic jam, the jumble of words, blathering chaos."

Let's pause and reflect on how such a life relates to Schopenhauer's aesthetics. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic experience happens when we rise above our preoccupation with our own will, our own individual survival, and, using art as a medium, observe the material, mundane world from a conceptual distance. For example: instead of participating in an actual love affair, we go to an art museum and stand before a painting of two people in love and behold the ideas (love, passion, yearning, attraction) the artist is portraying, and thus, as objective observers, we develop a clear, painless understanding of the dynamics of human emotion.

Of course, such objective observation is precisely what Herman Mussert experiences with his immersion in Ovid, Tacitus, Cicero and other ancient writers. At one point he reflects: "Whenever (I take off my glasses) I feel like a tortoise without a shell. That is to say, in the intimate proximity of the female body I am the most defenseless of creatures. Which explains why I kept largely aloof from those activities which everyone is always going on about and which, to me, have more to do with the animal kingdom than with human beings who concern themselves with less tangible aspects of existence."

However, Mussert tells us he lost his objectivity once when he was thirty years old in Lisbon. "Now for once I belonged to the ranks of ordinary people, the mortals, the rest, because I was in love with Maria Zeinstra." A married woman driven to avenge her husband's infidelity, Maria pulls Herman down from his aesthetic crow's nest and thrusts him into the nitty-gritty of a passionate affair. "And so now I was in love, and thus a member of the same weak, glutinous fraternity of one-track-minded automatons which I have always claimed to despise." Schopenhauer would nod his head, understanding how the raw forces of the universe are too powerful for us to escape completely; aesthetic distance happens at points in our lives, it is not a permanent state.

And Mussert's passionate affair has dire consequences. He relays how on one sunny afternoon he was dragged out to the playground by Maria's enraged husband and became a public spectacle, beaten up and humiliated in plain sight of everyone - students, teachers, administrators. For a man who lives his life at an aesthetic distance, a distance he creates through his books and ancient literature, this is a complete role reversal. For once Mussert is the actor on life's stage and all those ordinary mortals he despises get to be the spectators. Is it any wonder years later he wakes up in Lisbon having gone to bed the night before in Amsterdam? Such an experience would certainly make a deep impression on a sensitive man of letters predisposed to live his life in solitude, reading, surrounded by his books.

According to Schopenhauer, drama, being a superb reflection of human existence, can show life unfolding in three ways: 1) what is merely interesting, 2) what is sentimental, and 3) what is tragic. Specifically on the tragic, Schopenhauer's words are: "At the highest and hardest stage the tragic is aimed at: grievous suffering, the misery of existence is brought before us, and the final outcome is here the vanity of all human striving." Cess Nooteboom echoes Schopenhauer's tragic sense when he has Mussert reflect on a photograph taken by the Voyager at six billion kilometers away from the earth, "That sort of thing does not impress me. My tiny lifespan, the utter insignificance of my existence, they are no more microscopic for being viewed from such a distance."

Respecting the writing of novels, here is a Schopenhauer quote: "A novel will be the higher and nobler the more inner and less outer life it depicts . . . The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life; for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest - The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting." The Following Story is a tour de force of the inner life. And Mr. Nooteboom makes the small events in Mussert's life not only interesting for the reader but deeply probing and profound.

*The above Schopenhauer quotes are from `Arthur Schopenhauer -- Essays and Aphorisms' published by Penguin Books and translated by R.J. Hollingdale.

[Ilse · Rating 4 out of 5]

"I am sitting on the wall of the castle, looking out over the city, the river, the dish of sea beyond. Oleander, frangipani, laurel, great elm trees. A girl is sitting nearby, writing. The word "goodbye" is drifting in the air around me and I can't seem to catch hold of it. This entire city is a goodbye. The fringe of Europe, the last shore of the first world, it is there that the corroded continent sinks into the sea, dissolves into the infinite mist which the ocean resembles today. This city does not belong to the present, it is earlier here because it is later. The banal has not yet arrived. Lisbon is reluctant. That must be the word, this city puts off the moment of parting, this is where Europe says goodbye to itself. Lethargic songs, gentle decay, great beauty. Memory, postponement of metamorphosis. Not one of those things would find its way into Dr Strabo's Travel Guide. I send the fools to the fado taverns, for their dose of processed saudade. Slauerhoff and Pessoa I keep to myself."


(Moniek Muskee, View over Lisboa)

Herman Mussert, once a Dutch teacher of Latin and Greek, wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon despite having gone to bed the previous night in his flat in Amsterdam and in retrospect reflects on his life, unleashing a flow of meditations and stories. Human beings are condemned to think. Panta rhei. Any further revelation would ruin the pleasure of discovering this brief novel and the multiple narrative levels Nooteboom deploys in it for a future reader, which leaves this reader very little to say. Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.

Oneiric, mysterious and lavishly – even brashly - erudite (a plethora of quotations in Latin, comments on Greek philosophy and countless literary allusions particularly Ovid’s metamorphoses), thematisizing time, memory, poetry, mythology and the fluidity of identity, echoing Pessoa, J. Slauerhoff and Thomas Mann, there is plenty to enjoy in this cyclical story – which in an elegant, allegorical way deals with death and mortality. In the first part, not in the least because of its setting in Lisbon, I imagined having entered a parallel realm of dreams or wishful alternative lives as in Antonio Tabucchi's novels or Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon (its protagonist also a teacher of Latin and Greek running off to Lisbon).

Nooteboom's prose is lucid, playful, sometimes sublimely beautiful and often funny – the self-irony of his misanthropic, secluded protagonist, preferring the safety of his study room and his 4000 books to the company of people, sometimes bringing a chuckle of recognition to this reader: "Must you read all the time?" and "Do you ever think of anyone else?" Well, I did, as it happens, but on such occasions it was usually not of them. Besides, I simply had to get back to my books right away, because the company of most people, once the predictable events have taken their course, does not inspire conversation on my part."

Turning the pages eagerly, the second part, which is of a more cosmic dimension, however ingeniously composed, was mostly lost on me. Some of the plot elements (adultery, a convenient car accident, clichés about teachers) struck me as banal, even if the collision of the brutality of reality, the coarseness of human interaction with the cerebral haughtiness of the protagonist struggling with his sexuality is perhaps the kind of confrontation that enlivens Nooteboom’s story (because of Nooteboom’s fascination with Japanese culture, making me wonder if he intended to give his story a touch of wabi-sabi). Similarly, some aphoristic lines that first moved me by their apparent depth or beauty, with further reflecting on them lost their initial magic spell on me:

"Clocks served two purposes, in my opinion. The first was to tell people the time, and the second to impress upon me that time is an enigma, an intractable measureless phenomenon into which, out of sheer helplessness, we have introduced a semblance of order."

In short, beautiful and ingenious, notwithstanding some melodramatic moments, the following story handles potentially hefty themes in a rather funny than heavy-handed way. It is a delightful ode to the power of literature and I imagine particularly readers well-versed in philosophy might enjoy engaging into a mental conversation with this short book.

"Mirrors are useless:; they retain nothing, not the living and not the dead."
(***½)

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Following Story begins with awakening and matutinal meditations…

Let me go back, then, to the first hour of the morning, the moment that I opened my eyes, which I still possessed. “We will feel the draught blowing through the cracks in the structure of causality,” someone once said. Well, that morning it was very draughty indeed around me…

An intellectual… A former dead-languages teacher… An author of travel guides at present… His attitude to reality and himself is full of self-irony…
He falls asleep in Amsterdam and wakes up in Lisbon… So he tries to remember…

Something had happened to me and I did not know what it was, something compared to which my unexpected presence here was an insignificant detail. I stuck out my tongue, as I do quite frequently. In all its porcine simplicity it is still one of my most attractive features, and when I stick it out to myself in the mirror nine times out of ten it helps me enormously to concentrate.

He starts recalling the past… Walking the streets he basks in the rays of his past adulterous love…

I know that woman, she isn’t yet the stranger she would become later. That evening we had walked. Even after twenty years I needed no breadcrumbs to retrace the route we had taken. I follow the trajectory of my desire.

The past is not repeatable and it can’t be corrected.

[Helga · Rating 5 out of 5]

Outstanding storytelling, at once witty, profound, piercing and dark.

This is, I believe, it: not the cruel anguish of physical death but the incomparable pangs of the mysterious maneuver needed to pass from one state of being to another.
Easy, you know, does it, son.
-Nabokov

He goes to bed in Amsterdam and wakes up in the morning in a room in which he didn’t go to bed the night before.

What sort of time can this be in which time stands still?

Soon, he realizes he is in Portugal, where years ago he had travelled with his lover.

And I knew that room, because I had slept there twenty years ago with another man’s wife.

He has the feeling that he might be dead. Or is he dreaming?

Dreams are closed systems, in which everything fits to perfection.

Herman Mussert, known as Socrates, onetime Classics teacher at the university and now a writer of travel books under the pen-name Strabo, has a story to tell.

Every period in history has its own punishments, and ours has a multitude.

But first he should follow his own footsteps, return to the places he has traveled before and remember the days past.
He must remember in order to be able to tell us the following story.

And I? I had to turn round, I had to let go of the ship’s rail, to let go of everything, to look at you. You beckoned, it was not difficult to follow.

[Emmanuel Kostakis · Rating 5 out of 5]

“I know I had to guide my pupils past tenuous abstractions to the higher chemistry in which the man about to die seeks to divorce soul from body. He adducted proof upon proof of the immortality of the soul, but beneath all those ratiocinations yawned the chasm of death, the absence of soul.”

"The Following Story" centers around Herman Mussert, a former classics teacher, who wakes up in a Lisbon hotel room, despite having gone to sleep in his Amsterdam apartment the previous night. This surreal experience prompts a journey through his memories, “drinking its fill of time”. His affair with Maria Zeinstra, a married woman, is a focal point of his memories. This relationship, though passionate, is fraught with complications and moral ambiguities. Mussert is tormented by his actions and their implications, as his love for Maria is not just a source of joy but also of guilt and sorrow. “Love is in the one who loves, not in the one who is loved”. The affair’s eventual dissolution leaves Mussert in a state of emotional desolation, highlighting his inability to reconcile his desires with the realities of his situation.

The narrative shifts, and Mussert finds himself on a ship traveling along the Amazon River, a setting that is both physically and symbolically remote . The trip is presented as a memory and as a dreamlike experience, blending past and present, reality and imagination. Mussert encounters other passengers under a “common destiny”, who seem to exist in a liminal space, blurring the boundaries between life and death, reality and illusion. His interactions with these characters and his continued introspection led him to a deeper understanding of his own life and the stories that have defined him. Mussert’s reflections on his former lover, his students, and his own failings are tinged with a sense of inevitability and fatalism. His journey is not linear but cyclical ( a story within a story) , spiraling inward as he seeks meaning in the fragmented episodes of his life; an inexorable, perpetual change into perpetually the same. The blending of his life realities and dreamlike elements underscores the fluidity of time and memory - “the liquid I”.

“I had a thousand lives and I took only one…”.

Nooteboom, through a dialogue with the past, constructs a narrative of philosophical depth, blending reality with metaphysics. Mussert is thrust into a realm where the boundaries between past and present, life and death, become porous. This narrative device evokes a sense of disorientation, a surreal framework that propels Mussert through a journey of moral introspection. Mussert’s waking reality spun with the surreal clarity of Kafka’s Gregor Samsa’s bedroom, becomes a threshold to a deeper, more disconcerting reality. Mussert’s surroundings are eerily familiar yet disturbingly altered, a mirror to his internal disarray. The narrative oscillates between moments of lucidity and abstraction. This interplay of clarity and ambiguity serves to mirror Mussert’s own existential quest. The novella is replete with allusions to classical mythology, literature, and philosophy, intoned with Mussert’s reflections on his past love affair, his scholarly pursuits, and his ultimate confrontation with death. The themes of transformation and metamorphosis, central to Ovid's work, mirror Mussert's own journey as he grapples with his past and present.

“But the point is not immortality, …What is the point, then? The point is that we capable of thinking about immortality. That is what set us apart.”

In the end, what sets "The Following Story" apart is its seamless blend of the everyday with the extraordinary, that shifts effortlessly from the mundane to the profound, capturing the essence of human experience with a disarming clarity.

“None of us will ever know what the other saw when he was telling you his story, but whatever face you show, recognizable or absolutely not, expected or unexpected, it must have something to do with fulfillment.”

Brilliant!

4.9/5

PS. It’s been suggested that the two chapters in the novel cover the last two seconds of Mussert's life, one second of memory, and one second of the passing from life into death (.i.e. the action in the novel takes place when the narrator is neither alive nor dead but somewhere in-between): “The normally measurable dimensions of time and space become stretched and malleable in the strange and endless moment between living and dying.”

Additional context:
https://blogs.bl.uk/european/2015/07/...

[Ian · Rating 4 out of 5]

The first book I’ve read by the Dutch author Cees Noteboom, and I read the English translation. At just 93 pages this falls very much into the novella category, but believe me there is plenty in here to keep the brain occupied. The novel has metaphysical themes. Despite its brevity it is divided into two parts, of which more detail below.

I was attracted to this by the synopsis. The protagonist, Herman Mussert, is a former teacher of Latin and Ancient Greek, who lives alone. He goes to bed one night in his house in Amsterdam, but wakes up the next morning in a hotel room in Lisbon. It’s not just any hotel room, but one in which, 20 years earlier, he had spent the night with a married colleague, Maria Zeinstra. This was an important event in his life, since it led indirectly to him being sacked as a teacher. Since then he has made a living as a writer of travel guides, though he regards them as anodyne and holds his readers in total contempt. He’s actually something of a misanthrope, spending his evenings alone, reading his classical texts, and working on a new translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses. His meals consist of tins of baked beans and frankfurters. He tells us that “I have no equal when it comes to cutting short unwarranted interruptions.” Maria conducted her affair with him less out of desire than from a wish to even the score with her husband, also a teacher, who was conducting his own liaison with a 16-year-old girl pupil.

All of the above is set out in the First Part, in which Mussert, finding himself in Lisbon, revisits the locations and memories involved in his brief affair. I was deeply interested in the story. Part 2 of the Book begins at page 50 of my edition, and for the next 30 pages I was hopelessly confused about what was going on. Had the book not been so short I might well have given up at that stage, but I stuck with it in the hope it would all come together, and indeed it did in about the last dozen pages. At that point lots of earlier references suddenly made sense. This final section turned my opinion around entirely.

I suspect I was being slow on the uptake, and that many other readers would work things out before I did. It’s all very cleverly done though.

My edition did have a Foreword by the translator, that would have removed my confusion had I read it in advance, but I have a policy of not reading Forewords, Introductions etc until after I have read the actual novel. I prefer to try and work things out for myself.

If you do read this and find yourself with similar feelings to mine, stick with it until the end. It’s worth it!

[Clemens Schoonderwoert · Rating 4 out of 5]

**Should Read as 4.5 Stars**

This small Dutch novel is an immensely impressive piece of work by this author, that is published in English under the title "The Following Story", and in German it is titled "Die folgende Geschichte", where the author has become hugely popular after this novel, much more so than in his and my native Netherlands, while the book is also available in some other languages.

It's a gripping little novel, with a bit of time-travel of body, mind and soul by the protagonist of this tale, a man and teacher called: Herman Mussert aka teacher Sokrates.

Storytelling is impressive, the metaphysical travelling use of Sokrates's body, mind and soul in this tale is breath-taking, and it will come full circle at the end after searching for the true meaning of life and death.

All in all, this is an amazing little novel that's brought to us by the author in a very engaging fashion that should be read by anyone, and that's why I like to call it: "A Very Engrossing Story"!

[Harris Walker · Rating 5 out of 5]

A man goes to sleep in his bed, in Amsterdam, and wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon, where he had an affair many years ago. So starts an odyssey of memory, myth and melancholy of a life touched by grotesqueness, longing, unrequitedness and seclusion, recounted with effortless grace and serenity, probably in the face of his impending death.

‘I have never had an exaggerated interest in my own person, but unfortunately that did not imply I could stop thinking about myself at will, from one moment to the next. And that morning I certainly had something to think about. Another man might have resorted to a talk about life and death, but such weighty words do not come easily to my lips, even when there is no-one else there, as was then the case.’

The Following Story is an exquisitely written book, infused with humanity and contradictions; our protagonist accepts with alacrity a lugubrious life, has equanimity in the face of regrets and failures, and is filled with desire that's in equal measure replete with repression. It’s a reflective, purgatorial and philosophical tale, full of fatefulness, sometimes joy and death, uniquely delivered with a featherlight mordancy and wit. If recollections and purgatory are onerous subjects Nooteboom lyrically delivers them with charm and gracefulness. Though he's in a state of confusion few face death with such acquiescence as the protagonist when he awakes in a Lisbon hotel room.

‘I had woken up with the ridiculous feeling that I might be dead, but whether I was actually dead, or had been dead, or vice versa, I could not ascertain.’

Lyricism flows from acute observation, seamlessly woven with text that's metaphysical, has a touch of esotericism, classical references and modern idioms such that the story encompasses a timelessness whose balance at no time feels precarious or compromised. Though complex in scope and intention Nooteboom's delivery is deft, adept and one never loses a comprehension of the overall story where fable, metaphors, symbols and allegories are liberally sprinkled through contemporary prose and guide the narrative rather than confound it. But, ultimately, the reader must confront and resolve the conundrum of what is happening to our hapless anti-hero.

‘The water of the ocean looked black, it reeled, tossed, sailed away into itself, furling and unfurling, glistening sheets of liquid metal collapsing soundlessly, merging, each wave ploughing a furrow for the next to fold into, the inexorable, perpetual change into perpetually the same.’

In the end everything falls into place and in death our anti-hero has explained his life with dignity and composure such that one wouldn’t believe it might be told in any other way. I wasn't expecting to have such a sympathy with this introverted character full of limitations, imperfections and fears: a clown whose peculiarities satirised others peccadillos that they would have pronounced as normal.

What an exceptional book I’d hoped might never finish.

[Alexander Carmele · Rating 4 out of 5]

Berührende Lebensbilanz eines Träumers und kompositorisch-gelungene Allegorie aufs Abschiednehmen.

Inhalt: 3/5 Sterne (allegorische Liebesgeschichte, zu viele Zitate)
Form: 5/5 Sterne (lyrisches Dahingleiten)
Komposition: 3/5 Sterne (harter Sprung zwischen Teil eins und zwei)
Leseerlebnis: 5/5 Sterne (reflektierend-zirkulierendes Einvernehmen)

Nootebooms kurzer Roman „Die folgende Geschichte“ erschien 1991 und ist bislang sein viertletzter Roman geblieben. Er behandelt durchweg die Thematik des Todes, des Verlustes, des sich reflektierenden Lebensscheiterns. Sein Protagonist heißt Herman Mussert, ein ehemaliger Gymnasiallehrer für Griechisch und Latein, der sich in einer Art Schwebezustand zwischen Tod und Leben, zwischen Amsterdam und Lissabon, zwischen Europa und Südamerika befindet:

Auch ich habe meine Bibel [Ovids Metamorphose], und sie hilft wirklich. Und außerdem – mein Körper, obwohl wenn ich noch immer nicht in den Spiegel geschaut hatte, fühlte sich an wie er selbst. Das heißt, nicht ich war ein anderer geworden, ich befand mich lediglich in einem Zimmer, in dem ich mich nach den Gesetzen der Logik, soweit ich sie kannte, nicht befinden konnte. Das Zimmer kannte ich, denn hier hatte ich vor gut zwanzig Jahren mit der Frau eines anderen geschlafen.

Die zeitlichen, räumlichen und assoziativen Sprünge erschweren die Lektüre von „Die folgende Geschichte“ massiv, auch die Anspielungen, Referenzen an die Werke von Horaz und Ovid und Jan Jacob Slauerhoff, die teilweise überhand nehmen und den Lesefluss hindern. Die Irrealisierung der Erzählposition steht aber im Einklang mit dem Vorgängen der Geschichte. Letztlich verarbeitet Mussert eine verlorene Liebe, eine ungerechte Behandlung, eine Art Ausgestoßen-Sein, die ihm ungerechterweise zu Teil wurde. Diese Verletzung lastet schwer auf seinem Gemüt. Nun ausgestoßen aus dem Lehrbetrieb fristet er sein Dasein als Reiseschriftsteller, um Geld zu verdienen. Glück erwartet er nicht mehr:

Das Leben ist ein Eimer Scheiße, der immer voller wird und den wir bis zum Ende mitschleppen müssen. Das soll der heilige Augustinus gesagt haben, ich habe den lateinischen Text leider nie nachgeprüft. Wenn er nicht apokryph ist, steht er natürlich in den Confessiones.

Dieser Stelle lässt sich in den „Die Bekenntnisse des hl. Augustinus“ so nicht nachweisen. Spielt aber auch keine Rolle mehr für Mussert, der sich mit der Bedeutungslosigkeit der lateinischen und griechischen Sprache für die Neuzeit abfinden muss und den Niedergang der philologischen Ernsthaftigkeit damit nur unterstreicht. Nur Lisa d’India, eine Musterschülerin, teilt seine Freude, aber gerät durch diese in eine Dreiecksgeschichte wie das fünfte Rad an einem Wagen, die böse letztlich für sie und auch für ihn ausgeht. Ihm wird jede Hoffnung genommen, und um diesen lebensentscheidenden Moment, auf den die Geschichte zuläuft, geht es in der Retrospektive eines die Lebensbilanz ziehenden alten Mannes.

Ich wollte diesen schlafenden Mann nicht mehr sehen mit dem offenen Mund und den blinden Augen, die Einsamkeit dieses sich hin und her wendenden, wälzenden Körpers. Nach Maria Zeinstra hatte ich nie wieder die Nacht mit jemandem verbracht, es war, dachte ich damals, meine letzte Chance auf ein wirkliches Leben gewesen, was immer das bedeuten mochte. Zu jemandem gehören, zur Welt gehören, derlei Unsinn.

Cees Nooteboom schreibt ruhig, besonnen die Geschichte eines Träumers auf, der an die höhere Form der Liebe glaubte und an der niederen letztlich zerschellte. Seine „Die folgende Geschichte“ steht im engen Zusammenhang mit John Williams „Stoner“ und Han Kangs „Griechischstunden“. Es geht um die Leidenschaft nach Sprache, nach Gespräch, nach Kommunikation. Es geht um Platon, die Ideen, das platonische Wirken, Sublimieren, Potenzieren der Lebens- und Leibeslust, und die Fatalität, niemandem zu finden, mit dem diese Sehnsucht Wirklichkeit würde.

Eine Verarbeitung der Einsamkeit, die doch die Hoffnung nicht aufzugeben vermag, und deshalb Literatur wird, und nur ein wenig an dem gewollt-abrupten Übergang zwischen Kapitel eins und zwei und Überfülle an Literaturverweisen leidet.

[Mattia Ravasi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1ssLF...
Featured in my Top 20 Books I Read in 2017

A must read for fans of circular, self-reflective storytelling, and I know that's the kind of premise that makes a book look boring as fuck - but this is not! It's thrilling! Curious! Fascinating! Very dense, sure, but highly rewarding. I loved it.

[Anna Carina]

Keine Wertung möglich - Bildungsarmut und eine Szene 20 Seiten vor Schluss, die zum Abbruch führt. Habe die letzten Seiten nur noch überflogen.

Hier schreibt einer aus Einsamkeit heraus.
Einem Mangel, der tief in seiner Vergangenheit verankert ist.

Keine Entwicklung, keine Psychologisierung.
Wie in seinen Antiken Mythen und Schriften ist alles unmittelbar, roh, direkt. Vorherbestimmt, Schicksalsträchtig ab in den Tod. Mit viel Rumgepaddel auf mythologischen Gewässern.

Analytisch, distanziert. Auf mich intellektuell und oberlehrerhaft wirkend.
Einer der nur seine Konventionen hat.
Die pure Entfremdung durch das Symbolische gesetzt.
Ein Buch das keinen Prozess beschreibt sondern die Darstellung der Dynamik zwischen der symbolischen Ordnung und dem Realen.

„doch kein Feuer der Welt würde meine Materie noch verwandeln, ich war bereits verwandelt. Rings um mich wurde noch geschmolzen, gebrannt, da entstanden andere zweiköpfige Wesen, doch ich hatte meinen anderen, so rothaarigen Kopf schon vor langer Zeit verloren, ich war eine Art Schlacke geworden, ein Überbleibsel.“

Ständiger Wechsel von Rückblenden, Erinnerungen und traumartigen Sequenzen. Harte Brüche zwischen den Szenen. Verdrängung-Wiederholung- Verdrängung-Wiederholung

Zeit spielt irgendeine Rolle und bestimmt ganz viel mehr das ich nicht kapiert habe oder mir egal war.

Sprachlich gefiel es mir.
Mich hat die Tonalität des Erzählers nicht einfangen können. Die Darstellung der Liebe und die dramatische Zuspitzung in der Schule erlebe ich als lächerlich. Wenn hier der Versuch unternommen wurde, das Erhabene und das Lächerliche zu Kontrastieren, ist der Schuss in meinem Fall nach hinten los gegangen.
Der Text hat nichts zartes, sanftes für mich. Er ist eine Kopfgeburt, die eine ganz widerlich groteske Stimmung in mir hervorruft, die mich abstößt.
Ja in der ersten Hälfte gab es Szenen und Gedanken, die mir gefielen und mich berührt haben, zumal mir Sokrates durch Wielands Aristipp nahe ist.
Die können mich dennoch nicht im Kontext der Gesamtkomposition überzeugen, dem Buch mehr als 2 Sterne geben zu wollen.

Ich sollte mir ernsthaft Gedanken machen, warum ich mit Büchern über Kommunikation und Sprache nichts anfangen kann. Gratuliere mir selber zu misslungener Kommunikation mit diesem Buch.

[Ema · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've failed to write a review after finishing The Following Story and now, a month later, I'm tempted to lower the rating (and I'm doing it); the book didn't linger in my mind, the story was almost forgotten the moment I closed the covers.

You know the kind of book that is complex, with beautiful prose resembling poetry in its flourishes, that instead of the simple words uses an array of magically constructed phrases ... Well, The Following Story tried to be such a book, but didn't succeed - at least for me it didn't. It felt dry, like the unhappy result of a creative course in which the rule is to replace simple phrases with masterfully elaborated ones. I couldn't be swept by the pompous words line-up, I couldn't feel the magic, I couldn't truly relate to the novel.

I must acknowledge that some parts of the story were good, starting with the premise. One night, Herman Mussert goes to sleep in his house in Amsterdam and the following morning wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon. Not any room, though, but the one that had witnessed his illicit affair with Maria, biology teacher at the school where Herman was teaching classic literature. What follows is a rememoration of his years spent in the city, with the prevailing figures of his mistress and of a brilliant student, Lisa d'India. The novel is filled with references about classics, but I have to admit I don't remember anything. Herman Mussert failed to be a good teacher for me. Or I might not be an exemplary student.

Another imagery that I liked was towards the ending, when Herman Mussert finds himself on a boat with some complete strangers, each recounting their story. I was kind of distracted by then, so I didn't immediately realize how he had ended up on the boat and what all that meant. I had to read the passage again to understand that all those people, including Herman, were on their last trip before the imminent end of their lives. They were recounting the way they were about to die, which I found really interesting.

I didn't truly understand to whom was Herman Mussert addressing his story - to the woman on the boat which might have impersonated death? - but I had no desire to read the book again and decipher it better. If any of you holds the answer, please let me know!

It's funny that, from the entire book, the image that was carved in my memory was the description of a necrophore beetle preparing a dead rodent's body for its larvae. I'm strangely drawn towards macabre stuff, so I found it quite interesting. I'm hesitant though to read more of Cees Nooteboom's books, as I'm afraid I might have the same reaction to his writing...

[J.C. · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was Ian's review, here,
https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...
that led me to this book, which several of my GR friends have reviewed. Writing at its best, exploratory, dizzying.
I still haven't quite got to the Metamorphes, but Ovid's poem was clearly fuelling this story of realities at variance with each other, in an orgy of confrontation, destruction and reincarnation. The protagonist, a former classics teacher, is working on a translation of the text.
His pupils nicknamed him "Socrates", partly due to his stockiness and ugliness. He is a true classicist, finding his whole raison d'être in his teaching of the exquisite Latin phrases and the awe-inspiring tales. He has a mesmerising effect, on his pupils, on me, as I absorbed the dramatic narration of his 'star turn', his acting out before the class the story of the "charred Phaethon, driver of Phoebus' chariot". The story moves seamlessly through an unceasing intervention of classical tragedy, fate, upon the characters.
This class is witnessed by the two female figures who dominate the narrative, who were the instruments of metamorphosis in his life. One is a pupil, of a goddess-like quality, one a science teacher, portrayed almost like a Medusa, whose instruments of destruction are the sexton beetles transforming the corpse of a dead rat.
As Ian said in his review, the narration requires a level of mental agility, at the beginning - events, influences, do become clearer as the pages turn of their own accord, in a relentless dance where jarring or complementary realities pay tribute to the manipulation of time and effect that drives the story.
The second part takes place on a ferry journey, new players aligning themselves to play out their own roles as instruments of the gods, or victims of their own mortal status. The figure of a woman draws them on; but which woman? They cannot but follow, and lie fallow, under the stars in their fantastic constellations bearing the heroes of classic myth aloft, as the human beings beat helplessly their blind bats' wings. The supporting detail, throughout, is fantastic - even the protagonist's cat is called "Bat."
Like all good protagonists, 'Socrates' , Herman Mussert, is hard on himself. It is the only way through the myth and the mystery; weakness is fatal before the gods. Yet by the end of the book we ask, "Who the victim, who the perpetrator? Who the cause?" And it is not what, but who. The human being is the thing, human life is to be lived, whether the metamorphoses are in the life beneath or the life to come. The rat is consumed, and born again in the eggs of the sexton beetle. Phaeton rages against the glittering constellations; Socrates submits to the hand of man.

[Cosimo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cronaca di un'estasi

“Il tempo è il sistema cui è affidato il compito di far sì che non accada tutto contemporaneamente”.

Fuori e dentro il racconto sta il ricordo di ciò che si vede nell'aldilà, il dono di Mnemosyne, le immagini e i frammenti insensati dei sogni e della fantasia, che è impossibile afferrare nella terribile maturità della vita; così Nooteboom penetra nelle stanze del caso e danza nell'oceano delle ombre, dando vita a un incommensurabile canto dell'essere, socchiudendo la porta della notte. E' Lisbona la città alle nostre spalle, estremo confine di un sapere al tramonto? Si chiama Socrate questo nostro genitore inaffidabile? Non accadono insieme la poesia e la morte, in questa storia che mai riesce a dirci addio? Che cosa sono la parola e la materia? Poiché insegnare è rendere adulta gente ancora piena di splendore, l'autore decide di volare invece di navigare e di narrare l'innamoramento, di perdersi nelle sue conseguenze, unico discorso possibile nell'appartenere all'altro, appartenere al mondo con le sue misure dimenticate, con i suoi ultimi sospiri, le onde del presente, le lettere strappate. Ci interroga sul senso del credere alla nostra anima, che in un certo luogo ha fine; e allora si cerca di esplorarlo questo luogo, ma è un dove o forse un quando, senza dubbio è ora, il momento nel quale non sappiamo se siamo vivi, se siamo svegli, se siamo noi stessi. Il letterato Herman, ritrovando i suoi occhiali da vista, incontra il volto di amore e l'illusione della morte, scoprendone i tratti inesorabili e incongruenti, i paradossi e gli ossessivi enigmi, nei quali si nascondono; e testimonia di come essi trasformino le molteplici storie dei suoi compagni di viaggio (e le loro identità) in possibili soluzioni o destini o scioglimenti, che se non sono spiegazioni o fantasmi di spiegazioni, cercano almeno di tracciare un'itinerario plausibile del vivere o dello stesso inconsapevole viaggiare.

“Tutte le mie metamorfosi sono metafora delle tue metamorfosi”.

[Nick Grammos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Part of my "summer of illusions" reading. Though not intended.

I had big plans to review this book, but my fingertips ran out of words on the keyboard.

[Pedro · Rating 4 out of 5]

El último viaje de Hermann

El profesor Hermann Mussert se despierta una mañana, sorprendido, en un hotel de Lisboa, pese a qué está seguro de haberse acostado en su departamento de Ámsterdam. Cruzan por su cabeza algunas dudas: ¿Está soñando? ¿Está muerto?

Este giro extraño tampoco lo perturba mucho su espíritu curioso y abierto a lo trascendente, y hasta le parece interesante; es un experto en latín y griego antiguo, absorbido por sus mitos, leyendas, y la perfección de sus hexámetros la pura precisión de la lengua, tanto más interesante y rico que la vulgaridad de los vínculos de la vida cotidiana.

"´¿Alguna vez piensas en alguien que no seas tú´? Pues sí que lo hacía, pero no en ellas. Y además tenía que ponerme de nuevo a leer enseguida, ya que la compañía de la mayoría de las personas, después de los acontecimientos fáciles de predecir no da pie a ninguna conversación”

Sus clases no son las más populares entre sus alumnos, que por su aspecto breve y tosco lo apodan Sócrates, aunque en algunos casos logra transmitir su pasión.

“...y entonces Critón quiere que antes coma algo, dice que el sol aún brilla sobre las montañas, que aún no se ha puesto del todo, - y entonces miramos todos a las montañas en el patio y lo vemos, un fuego rojo sobre las montañas azules-. Pero me niego. Sé que hay otros que esperan hasta el último momento pero yo no quiero. ´No, Critón,́ digo ¿Qué ganaría si bebo el veneno un poco más tarde, si yo, como un niño llorón, permanezco aferrado a la vida?.........

-Ahora llega el momento crítico, tienen que salir de clase. No tienen ganas de decir nada, y yo tampoco.”-

El lugar que ha sido elegido para su nueva aventura es, significativamente, uno caro a su corazón: en él ocurrió su única historia de amor, la única vez que estuvo enamorado (la otra posibilidad, la única mujer que entendía su alma, entraba en lo prohibido por el tabú). La mujer imprevisible que alteraba sus planes, a la que amaba a pesar de ello (o tal vez por ello).

“Conozco a esta mujer, todavía no es la extranjera de más adelante.”

Transcurren los días, alternando los recuerdos de su vida con su actividad en Lisboa; la atmósfera y los personajes comienzan a adquirir un carácter de extrañeza, y se va insinuando un cierto sentido.

Una buena novela, en la que el autor canaliza sus pensamientos e inquietudes, en particular en torno al sentido y lo importante de la vida (lo inevitable de la muerte); también la continuidad del yo; la memoria (¿Acaso puede quedar atrapada en esa masa gelatinosa?); ¿Dónde hay más verdad? ¿En la ciencia o en la poesía?. Y todo a través de una muy buena historia, bien narrada, y con muy buenos personajes.

[El · Rating 4 out of 5]

Cees Nooteboom lives in Amsterdam. And his name is Cees Nooteboom. Coolest, craziest name ever. No one living in Amsterdam with a name like Cees Nooteboom would write a normal story about normal, everyday sorts of things. That just doesn't happen.

A person living in Amsterdam with a name like Cees Nooteboom does write a quick little fable-like story about Herman Mussert who wakes up in a completely different place where he had gone to sleep the night before. Different country, different currency in his pocket. WTF, right? We're taken on this brief journey through the bigger events in his life (his love, his previous career, etc.) just as (not quite a spoiler) we get the idea that his life is coming to an end.

It's a beautiful book, and as I'm currently still reading Proust (and most likely will be until the day I die), this was a nice distraction, for lack of a better word.

Maybe I can relate to Mussert. No, I don't look like Socrates, and no one has called me a "meatball" ever (at least not to my face), but Mussert is a reader. He knows books better than most people. He feels more comfortable with his authors and titles than he does around the living and breathing that come in and out of his life every day. I dig that.

"Damn know-all," or "If you ask me, you don't even notice whether I"m here or not," were often-heard complaints, along with "Must you read all the time?" and "Do you ever think of anyone else?" Well, I did, as it happens, but on such occasions it was usually not of them. Besides, I simply had to get back to my books right away, because the company of most people, once the predictable events have take their course, does not inspire conversation on my part.

[Kuszma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vannak könyvek, ahol a szöveg csiszoltsága nem azt a célt szolgálja, hogy az olvasó világosabban lásson, hanem inkább fátyolt igyekszik képezni köztünk és a történet között. Nooteboom tökéletest karcoló mondatai – úgy érzem – nem leírnak, hanem elrejtenek, olyan lépcsőt alkotnak, aminek a funkciója nem a valahová jutás, hanem a lépcsőmászás öröme. Persze, persze, eljutunk azért valahová: Herman Mussert szégyenének lassan kibomló, misztikummal kokettáló története önmagában is megállná a helyét, de hál' Istennek nem áll önmagában. Hanem pazar mondatok hordozzák.

„Néha látni olyat, hogy a kutya saját farkába harap. Ilyenkor egyfajta kutyaforgószél támad, ami csak akkor ül el, amikor a viharból a kutya mint kutya lép elő.”

Jó, ha egy könyvben vannak olyan mondatok, amelyekhez az ember visszalapoz, hogy kérőddzön rajtuk még egy kicsit.

[Michael · Rating 5 out of 5]

When asked by a patient of the particular institution for the mentally ill and dangerous in which I work, ‘What is it [the book] about?’, I, trying to give a quick, honest, understandable but final answer (i.e. limit the follow up questions to avoid crossing professional boundaries), opened my mouth and heard the words, ‘It’s about a man remembering his life.’ I don’t think I would have put it that way if I hadn’t been put on the spot. And it wasn’t until I did put it that way that I could realize that not only did that statement seem more true than all I had before consciously conceived (to the effect of being truest), but it seemed subtly pregnant with troublesome meaning–that is, an implication oft overseen. From what position would you imagine such a man is doing said remembering? A living one? What if a child of 8 told you, ‘I’m remembering my life.’ You would laugh. Amused? Tickled? Both impressed and dismissive? Saying, 'kids'? Does a child of 8 not have a life to remember? And at what point does it stop being funny? 12? 20? 31? 39? 62? 87? Something about the sentence, ‘It’s about a man remembering his life.’ seems–to me–to imply that we don’t really know from what position the man remembers. We have words like soul and limbo and purgatory and death and heaven and hell etc., but how often are we willing to admit that the lot, however they are amended or combined, will always fall short of the actual abstract something they all hover around? Though Nooteboom uses these sort of words, he does well to keep any particular one from being the trustworthy toehold we likely would like it to be.

“The world would continue to enact its masques of day and night as if to remind us of something, and we, who were already elsewhere, would observe this.”

Who ever says, ‘I’m remembering my life,’? And yet we are constantly remembering our lives, often while sneering at the smiling faces telling us to live in the now. So if we are remembering our lives, if we’re not living in the now, from what position are we remembering? What is remembering?

This is a short, rich book that is a quite refreshing combination of coy and unfolding. The clues are wonderfully varied; and their allocating masterfully timed. If it helps you understand, half way through the book I had second thoughts when thinking a second reading would be illuminating to what is really happening; and near the end I was certain that a second reading would be illuminating but I didn’t really care to believe I could know what is really happening, even though you could walk away from this book feeling certain. I choose not to.

“You had taught me something about infinity, about how an immeasurable space of memories can be stored in the most minute time span, and while I was permitted to remain as small and coincidental as I was, you had shown me my true stature.”

[Lukasz Pruski · Rating 5 out of 5]

"We will feel the draft blowing through the cracks in the structure of causality"

Is there such a thing as an impossibly beautiful book? Probably not, but Cees Nooteboom's "The Following Story" comes awfully close. So close that when I had finished reading the novella, I immediately read it again. It might not resonate with everybody, though: past a certain age, one subject tends to preoccupy one's mind, and Mr. Nooteboom writes, beautifully, about that subject. So while a younger reader will be likely to ask "What is that all about?", those of us who are almost there, will know.

This short novella has two distinct parts: In "One" Herman Mussert, a teacher of Latin and an author of cheap travel guides, tells us how having gone to sleep in Amsterdam, he wakes up in a room in Lisbon, the same room where he had made love to a woman many, many years ago. We do not know which "he" he is, though: the "he of then" or the "he of now"? The structure of causality is drafty indeed. What is "now", by the way? Where is it where it is not here any more? And what is "I"? Am I the same I as 20 years ago?

In the dreamlike and hypnotic "Two" Mr. Mussert is on a ship traveling across the ocean, into the mouth of the Amazon river, close to the city of Belém on the Brazilian coast, and then up and up the river, past Manaus and the Rio Negro junction, surrounded by the nocturnal jungle. The ship passengers take turns to tell stories of their lives and then they quietly disappear, one by one, never to be seen again. Mr. Mussert is waiting for his turn.

The two parts, so remarkably different, need each other: the second would not make its tremendous impact without the first; the first without the second would just be a philosophical discourse on causality and passage of time. What makes this book so powerful is that its ostensibly main theme - our impermanence - is not the dominating one; "The Following Story" is also about love in its multitude of forms: love for beauty, as in poetry of Ovid, love for a student who shares the teacher's zeal in the quest for truth and knowledge, love for Socrates' courage of convictions, and - of course - Mr. Mussert's love for Mrs. Zeinstra.

The translation is extraordinary; I do not believe the prose of the original could be any more luminous and delightful. The one problem with "The Following Story" is that after reading it most other books will seem like empty tales "told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing."

Five stars.

[Ernst · Rating 5 out of 5]

War mein Lieblings-Nooteboom, eine sehr schöne Geschichte, hab dann noch Rituale gelesen und Allerseelen bereits ausgelassen. Zu meinen Lieblingsautoren hat er nie gezählt aber dieses Büchlein war super.

[Jim Elkins]

Ersatz Culture and Ostentatious Erudition

I was tricked by Nooteboom's continuing good reputation into reading another of his novels. He has the same tickling anxiety about what real culture might be, the same skating fear of real profundity (caused, I think, by his own sense that he has no access to it), that drives people like Woody Allen to write compulsively about whomever they think is a major literary figure, or whatever they have heard is a major intellectual concept. Nooteboom's books are tumbling landslides of allusions to high culture. His characters breathe an air floating with odd-shaped pieces of cultural detritus. They are alarmingly self-satisfied with the ratcheting accumulation of scraps they see as culture.

It is depressing to think that this stands for culture, knowledge, and even psychological insight.

Update, August 2023: there's a good article on Nooteboom's domestic reputation in the Netherlands by Jaap Goedegebuure, "Head in the Clouds" (in Dutch), October 13, 2012. Many thanks to Mark Daelmans for telling me about it.

[Ruud · Rating 5 out of 5]

Altijd gedacht dat Nooteboom zich beperkte tot het schrijven van het betere reisboek. Niet dus! Er wordt wel gereisd, maar hier door de geest ..

In het voorwoord van een van mijn all-time favoriete auteurs schrijft David Mitchell:
”Deze novelle is een waar juweeltje van Europese schrijfkunst, dat zich naar mijn mening zonder meer kan meten met Angelsaksische meesterwerken als The Turn of the Screw van Henry James of Heart of Darkness van Joseph Conrad.

Zoals ieder meesterwerk bezit Het volgende verhaal evenwel een volstrekt eigen stem en sfeer.”

Na lezing kan ik dat alleen maar beamen. Wel vraag ik mij af of de schrijver losjes geïnspireerd werd door één van mijn all-time favoriete boeken: Mercier’s Nachttrein naar Lissabon: Lissabon, zelfde sfeer, docent klassieke talen, plotseling vertrek. Was mij niet bewust dat dit een boekenweekgeschenk was. Pareltje!

[Carlos · Rating 4 out of 5]

¿Qué tiempo es ese en el que no se mueve el tiempo?

La lectura, y muy particularmente la lectura de la ficción bien podría ser considerada en su acepción más completa, como una aventura metafísica. Esto implica, por supuesto, que hay niveles que definen en mayor o menor medida, la capacidad de adentrarse en lo que se lee. Cualquier lector experimentado se pierde fácilmente, echando a andar la imaginación, en los confines fantásticos del tiempo y el espacio: las cuatro dimensiones del mundo físico. Visto así, el arte es una propuesta bien real de expansión dimensional. Anoche, por ejemplo, escuchaba El Pájaro de Fuego de Stravinski y los cuarenta y seis minutos de la versión de Pierre Boulez y la Sinfónica de Chicago, se convirtieron en mi interior en una masa temporal indefinible (justo al final de la sección quince en el disco), similar al trance onírico y el despertar de cada mañana. ¿Cuánto tiempo, en el reloj interno, había transcurrido de la primera a la última nota?

La historia que Cees Nooteboom propone es más o menos la siguiente: un profesor de lenguas muertas viaja durante el sueño y recopila todo lo que en el otro lugar ve:

“Los brazos más grandes del mundo me habían sacado de la cama en Amsterdam y, por lo visto, me habían vuelto a acostar en una habitación de Lisboa”.

Sus vastas lecturas y dominio filológico lo llevan a comprender, gracias a Ovidio, la metamorfosis que experimenta. La novela está dividida en dos partes. La trama de la primera, quizá por la aparición de la ciudad blanca, me trajo a la memoria Réquiem de Antonio Tabucchi, novela en donde el personaje principal también experimenta un desdoblamiento metafísico y un encuentro con fantasmas de su pasado. La segunda parte es un viaje en barco y el profesor convive con otros personajes: un sacerdote, un aviador, un niño, un periodista, un erudito. La idea me recordó Stalker, la enorme película de Andrei Tarkovski, donde un grupo similar emprende un viaje metafísico que entre otras cosas, dispara y agranda la percepción de los viajeros y su relación con el tiempo. La idea borgiana del hombre que se sueña soñando, de igual forma está al centro de la trama.

El tiempo es un enigma, un fenómeno licencioso y desmedido que se niega a dejarse conocer y en el que nosotros hemos introducido un orden aparente desde la impotencia.

Quizá la traducción no es lo suficientemente pulida como para transmitir la totalidad del mensaje del autor. Este es un problema al que nos enfrentamos los lectores, sabiendo de sobra que una traducción no es más que una aproximación de la idea inicial. En mi opinión, una mejor traducción habría hecho mayor justicia a esta magnífica novela.

¿Quid non imminuit diez?

¿Qué no es destruido por el tiempo?

[Marc Lamot · Rating 2 out of 5]

The reviews on Goodreads make clear that this little book leaves no one indifferent: some find it purely drivel, others appreciate it as an ingenious work. I tend to the latter.
The negative comments probably are related to the confusion the reader has to undergo, whilst reading this novel. Nooteboom starts with presenting us a rather clumsy teacher of ancient languages in a college in Amsterdam, suddenly waking up in a room in Lisbon; then the author jumps through space and time, he drags in a platonic lovestory with a 16-year old student and a real, though very short, affair with a revengeful collegue-teacher; and in the second half of the book he steps on a boat in Lisbon, to make an imagined crossover to Brasil in the company of 6 people, obviously bifurcations of his own personallity.
To the experienced reader this short summary already makes clear there are lots of references to Kafka, Pessoa, Conrad and Zweig. The main character also raves about Latin and especially the work of Ovid. And then there are the philosophical reveries on time and reality, although they are much more elaborate in Nootebooms later work 'All Souls', but then situated in Berlin.
In short, there is a lot to find in this 90-page book, and in that sense you may say it is rather virtuoso, and quite in line with the postmodernism of the end of the last century. It is not one of Nootebooms best, but well worth reading.

[Argos · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hollandalı olduğundan mı nedir tam olarak benim yazarım dememe rağmen Cees Nooteboom’dan okuduğum 4. kitap. Çok zor bir metin, hepi topu 100 sayfa olmasına karşın 4 günde okudum. Çok da ısınamadım. Antik diller öğretmeni Herman Mussert hem anlatıcı hem roman kahramanı. Antik çağ yazarları ve Latince etkisi altındaki kahramanımızın kendini arayış çabaları. Karışık ve yoğun bir kısa roman.

[José Van Rosmalen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Is dit een meesterwerk of is het pedante literaire kitsch, een omgevallen boekenkast vol literaire citaten die moeten getuigen van literaire belezenheid? Een leraar klassieke talen, met de omineuze naam Herman Mussert gaf les aan een Amsterdams gymnasium en moet daar plotseling het veld ruimen na een vechtpartij met een collega docent als gevolg van een vrijpartij met diens partner. Hij stortte zich vervolgens op het schrijven van populaire reisgidsen waarbij hij een schuilnaam gebruikte. Ondertussen leeft zijn andere zelf voort in Portugal, het lijkt alsof hij een dubbellichaam heeft. Die dubbelganger is een man die opgaat in literaire citaten en verwijzingen, waarmee hij in de wereld van de fictie terecht komt. Je kunt het een verfijnd literair spel noemen, maar het eist ook nogal wat van de lezer, je kunt er soms geen touw aan vastknopen. Hierin zie ik ook wel overeenkomsten met zijn ‘ lied van schijn en wezen’. Zeker bij een boekenweekgeschenk mag je een redelijke mate van toegankelijkheid verwachten en dus geen literaire en filosofische gewichtigdoenerij.

[M. Sarki · Rating 3 out of 5]

My disappointment in The Following Story is of course only a temporary arrangement constructed as a forgettable dream here in my consciousness. But how a particular book can get so lost on a person like me is astounding. It does not happen often. There are books that arouse in me great feeling and others that relate the truth of who I am, but then others are dead as if I am too, and then I am left feeling totally disheartened. Long ago I quit beating myself up for not understanding a certain text. I learned to continue on just reading through it, waiting for something profound to happen in my body or finally a joy to erupt as my just reward. But the barrage of Nooteboom references to ancient writers such as Ovid, Tacitus, and Cicero kept me outside and at great distance because no matter how seriously I took them the classics have never occurred to me as something I might be seriously interested in. Throughout the years casual looks at the numerous texts available to me never gave me cause for further study. Because of this character defect in myself poets such as William Butler Yeats, whose poems refer consistently to the classics, mean nothing to me and hence neither does he. But that is not to say I do not appreciate the almost secret code that only others privy to the ancients might understand and expound on in the wonderful reviews that sometimes follow their readings. There are some writers such as W.G. Sebald who can present unknown icons to me but still leave me connected to the text and completely engaged. Nooteboom failed in this regard. I was forever lost at sea, and even when brought to rapt attention by details provided regarding an illicit affair I never felt wholly involved in the text. But because I already hold Cees Nooteboom in such high regard based only on my prior reading of Rituals, I am claiming to be the one to blame here. And for me at least the many brilliant reviews of this book still occupy a higher ground than The Following Story ever could.

[Lisa Verbist · Rating 3 out of 5]

Dit verhaal krijgt vorm door een spel van metaforen en mooie citaten, toch trok het me tijdens het lezen niet erg aan. Ik spreek in de verleden tijd, omdat mijn mening ondertussen al is veranderd door een grondige analyse over de rol van het geheugen in de constructie en stijl van de roman.