The Following Story - Hardcover

Nooteboom, Cees

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0151000980 ISBN 13: 9780151000982

Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 1994

Synopsis

Herman Mussert went to bed last night in Amsterdam and wakes in Lisbon in a hotel room where he slept with another man’s wife more than twenty years ago. Winner of the European Literary Prize for Best Novel, and a New York Times Notable Book of the Year. Translated by Ina Rilke. A Helen and Kurt Wolff Book

About this title

About the Author

CEES NOOTEBOOM was born in 1933 in The Hague. He has published nine novels and over a dozen collections of travel writing, including Roads to Santiago. He lives in Amsterdam and Spain.

Reviews

Sardonic, erudite bachelor Herman Mussert, a classics scholar and writer of travel guides, goes to bed one night in his Amsterdam flat but inexplicably wakes up in a Lisbon hotel. He slowly realizes that this is the very room where he had an affair with married biology teacher Maria Zeinstra 20 years before. Is he dreaming or dead or time traveling? So begins Dutch novelist Nooteboom's (The Knight Has Died) semi-surreal, elegantly lyrical, enchanting but baffling postmodernist fable, winner of the 1993 European Literary Prize. Strewn with classical allusions and archetypal images in collision with the modern world, Mussert's dreamlike narration is a haunting meditation on the inescapable reality of death, the blindness of love, the vanity of human endeavor and the possible existence of an immortal soul. These themes are explored as the narrator reenacts his tawdry affair and embarks on a voyage with a motley crew-an astronomer/captain, a Benedictine priest, an exiled Chinese scholar, a Third World journalist and an elusive mystery woman-sailing up the Amazon.
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Philosophy, mythology, humor, and love blend comfortably in this novella, which won the 1993 European Literary Prize for Dutch author Nooteboom (The Knight Has Died, 1990, etc.). When bookish bachelor Herbert Mussert awakens in Lisbon, his last memory is of going to bed in his solitary apartment in Amsterdam. Troubled and bemused by his amnesiac journey to the city--indeed the very hotel room--where 20 years earlier he shared a passionate sojourn with a lover now lost, he contemplates and discards one explanation after another. Then he sets out to revisit the cafes, boulevards, and harbor where he and Maria Zeinstra dallied two decades before. A teacher of biology in the same school where he taught classical languages, Maria mesmerized Herbert with her ability to transform the usual into the unique. Transfiguration--whether of a homely intellectual classics professor into a besotted lover or of the Latin language into sublime poetry--has always fascinated Herbert. Maria's elucidation of the ultimate metamorphosis from life to death and its essential link to love is rendered in a deadpan description of her classroom lecture on mating, death, and birth among a species of beetles; its flattened tone makes an unlovely subject fresh and slyly funny. Herbert also remembers his gifted student Lisa d'India, whose affair with Maria's doltish husband led to a tragedy of classic scope, diminished by the survivors' banal responses. One day, as inexplicably as he arrived in Lisbon, Herbert boards a boat bound for Brazil with a handful of other passengers. As they approach Brazil, each passenger reveals the hidden event that has led to their common destiny, and the mystery of Herbert's journeys is solved. Nooteboom scores with a pleasantly textured tale whose subtle mysteries keep the reader alert through all its diverting wanderings. -- Copyright ©1994, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.

Nooteboom (The Knight Who Died, LJ 6/1/90) is one of The Netherlands' premier writers. In his incomparable style he has written a novella about a man traveling through space who tells a story about traveling through time. Herman Mussert, a Latin and Greek teacher, doesn't believe in the self but in a soul that undergoes endless transformations of love and death. He is nevertheless surprised when he goes to bed in Amsterdam and wakes up in Lisbon, with Portuguese money in his wallet. We follow Mussert's soul as it moves on, eventually leaving life and finding meaning: endless death, endless transformations, endless love. Herman has been trapped in the mundane, but at last he escapes. This novel is all imagination, dream desire, language, and reflection. Recommended for literary fiction collections.
Gene Shaw, NYPL
Copyright 1994 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Edition details

• Publisher: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt
• Publication date: 1994
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0151000980
• ISBN 13: 9780151000982
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 128