Rituals     by Cees Nooteboom, Translated by Adrienne Dixon Original title: Rituelen Original language: Dutch Original year: 1980 Published by Harcourt Pub. Date: 1996 Format: Paperback, 145 pages Dimensions: (in inches): 0.39 x 8.03 x 5.37 ISBN: 0156003945 List Price: $11.00, £6.99 Buy online from Amazon.co.uk for £6.99 Buy online from Amazon.com for $8.80 Published by Harvill, London Pub. Date: 1983 Format: 153 pages Not available for ordering Published by Harcourt Brace, San Diego Pub. Date: 1996 Format: 145 pages Not available for ordering Published by Penguin, London Pub. Date: 1985 Format: 145 pages Not available for ordering Published by Penguin, London Pub. Date: 1992 Format: 145 pages Not available for ordering Published by Viking, New York Pub. Date: 1984 Format: 145 pages Not available for ordering Published by Louisiana State University Press, Baton Rouge Pub. Date: 1983 Format: 145 pages Not available for ordering Published by Harvester, Brighton Pub. Date: 1983 Format: 152 pages Not available for ordering

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Despite the fact that his first two novels gained literary awards, Nooteboom was better known as a travel writer until the publication of Rituals in 1980. That gained him not only yet another Dutch literary prize but also the American Pegasus Prize and, through translation, a wider audience. The book’s narrative element is made the excuse for a series of fantasies, poetic set pieces and meditations and it is its curious episodic structure that makes it interesting.


The ever-changing character of time, its ordering and what is retained of its passing are the novel’s chief themes. It is divided into three sections, each of which deals with a sexual encounter and a death. The first section is short and the death is really a failed attempt at suicide. It introduces us to the main character, Inni Wintrop, a self-indulgent dilettante with a private income and a permanent identity crisis. The longer second section takes us back ten years to 1953 and Inni as a young man, more or less abandoned by his family. An eccentric aunt looks him up and takes him to meet a former lover, Arnold Taads. Equally an eccentric, a self-hater and obsessed with death, he lives his day according to a strict, clock-regulated timetable. The third section takes us forward twenty years to 1973, when the finally self-assured Inni meets by chance Arnold’s son Philip Taads, whom he had abandoned soon after his birth and never mentioned. Philip, also a self-hater, is a devotee of Zen and the Japanese Tea Ceremony. Having achieved the ambition of purchasing an authentic ancient tea bowl, he performs the perfect ceremony (beautifully described by the travel writer in Nooteboom) and then commits suicide.


If time is the novel’s most obvious preoccupation, the narrative pendulum swinging freely between past and future in all three sections, the secondary question of what gives structure to the self in a world of constant change is also raised by the behaviour of the three chief characters. Arnold Taads views time as an eternity of flux in which a person’s death is an unimportant and bathetic commonplace. The best he can do is regulate change by the clock. Philip’s world is the timeless one of the mystic where death brings an end to the confusing illusion of the self. He seeks refuge in ceremony and monastic simplicity. Inni prefers the little death of brief sexual encounters with women, an experience of oneness through intuitive links with his partners of a night. An ex-catholic, he is both drawn to and repelled by the latter-day substitutes for defining ritual of the two Taads. The question is left open whether Inni’s laissez-faire capitalism is any more liberating or ultimately satisfying.

‘Sartre,’ said the gray wavy hair, the smallish skull, the chamois jacket, the corduroy trousers and the Russian leather boots in front of him, ‘Sartre says we should draw the ultimate conclusion from the fact that God does not exist. Do you believe in God?’

‘No,’ Inni called out.

‘Since when don’t you?’ asked the pine trees and the bramble bushes (¼).

‘I don’t know. Perhaps I never did believe,’ he shouted ahead. The scornful laugh of a magpie replied. And suddenly the whole wood was full of church fathers, inquisitors, martyrs, confessors, agnostics, heathens, philosophers, bleaters and brayers. Theological arguments flew all around. Two finches were discussing the Council of Trent, a cuckoo underlined the Summa Theologica, a woodpecker endorsed the thirty-one articles and sparrows condemned Hus to the stake once again. Spinoza the heron, Calvin the crow, the incomprehensible cooing of the Spanish mystics, the chirping, twittering, gurgling and clucking birds of field and woodland celebrated two bloody millennia of church history, from the first swimming fishes scratched on the walls of the catacombs to the spirit that had singed St Paul in the guise of an inhabitant of Nagasaki, from the perplexity of the men of Emmaus to the infallible vicar occupying the See of the Fisherman. Oceans of that same human blood had been shed since then, and millions of times that same body had been consumed. Not an hour, not a day went by without this being done, at the North Pole, in Burma, Tokyo and Namibia, even at the moment when these two unbelievers were walking here under the linden, one with his head full of Sartre, the other with his head full of nothing. (p. 37, 39, tr. Adrienne Dixon)