The following Story     by Cees Nooteboom, Translated by Ina Rilke Original title: Het volgende verhaal Original language: Dutch Original year: 1991 Published by Harcourt Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback, 115 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.39 x 8.02 x 5.35 ISBN: 015600254X List Price: $11.00 Buy online from Amazon.com for $8.80 Published by Harcourt Brace, New York Pub. Date: 1993 Format: 115 pages Not available for ordering Published by Harvill, London Pub. Date: 1993 Format: 150 pages Not available for ordering

Click on image to see enlargement

The narrator of The Following Story is uncertain at the outset of this short novel what is happening to him, and so is the reader. By the end there are only two plausible explanations: the narrator is dreaming, or he is passing from the land of the living to that of the dead. What form does this crossing over take? A literal crossing in a ship, first of all, from Portugal’s Belem tower to its counterpart in Brazil, and during the journey, the passengers each tell their own story. When it is the narrator’s turn, we have reached the end of the book, except that we read: ‘And then I told her, then I told you the following story’. The narrator’s fictional story is, it seems, the book which the reader is holding, in which a character called Herman Mussert, lying in bed in Amsterdam wakes up in Lisbon which he had once visited with his lover. Memories of his life are then interwoven with musings on literature, time and metamorphosis and with narrative switches to the man in bed.


Nooteboom uses humour and self-irony to temper his clever game with fictionality. For a start, Mussert is the most unlikely lover. He is a classics teacher whom the pupils have nicknamed Socrates because he seems to belong more to the age of the ancient Greeks than to his own. As a result of having to observe a biology lesson about a female beetle who kills her own mate to feed the young, he comes into contact with Maria Zeinstra. He is the cerebral aesthete, she is in tune with the physical world, and she almost breaks down the barrier of eccentricity he has carefully built up. Disaster looms, for Maria’s husband, Arend Herfst, a PE teacher at the same school, starts an affair with Socrates’ best pupil. After a playground punch-up Herfst crashes his car, killing the girl. She is the one to whom Mussert narrates ‘the following story’.


Nooteboom’s achievement is to have produced a complex novel which plays its fictional games with such a light touch that it is a pleasurable, entertaining read. For the literary-minded the rich texture of echoes and allusions never flashily or insistently displayed provides another dimension to The Following Story. The temptation for the reader is to follow the story right back to its Kafkaesque beginning: «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», putting into practice the eternal recurrence which is the novel’s theme.

I live in an old chesterfield draped with a well-worn oriental rug to hide the disgorged stuffing, and I read under a standard lamp by the window. I read all the time. The people living across the canal from my house once told me they are always pleased when I am back in Holland, because they regard me as a sort of beacon. The wife even confided she sometimes observes me through binoculars. ‘And then when I take another look an hour later you’re still sitting there, in exactly the same position. Sometimes I think you must be dead.’

‘What you call dead is in fact concentration,’ I said, because I have no equal when it comes to cutting short unwanted interruptions. But she insisted on knowing what I spent all my time reading. Such moments are quite enjoyable, for the conversation took place in the local café De Klepel, and I have a powerful, some would even say aggressive, voice. ‘Last night I was reading Theophrastus’ Characters, Madame, and after that I read some pages of Nonno’s Dionysiaca.’ That sort of remark is guaranteed to bring an instant hush in such surroundings, and from then on I am left in peace. (p. 9, tr. Ina Rilke)