The Following Story by Cees Nooteboom

Dutch fiction

Original title – Het volgende verhaal

Translator – Ina Rilke

Source – Personal copy

I saw this book on Both Karen’s and Simon’s blog recently. I had brought this copy a couple years ago second-hand. I have long been a fan of Cees, he did an interview many years ago for the blog. Over the time of the blog, I have reviewed five other books by Cees over the years. He is ne of my favourite writers a man that mix classics, his love of travel and places and most of all being Dutch into his fiction. I have read an earlier book by him that was brought out by Machlehose a few years ago in the Dutch mountains. But this book that came out thirty years ago brought him to a wider speaking audience.In fact, maybe this book is best summed up by what he said when I asked him about Dutch literature. He said Dutch literature may be an acquired taste; we are a metropolitan country, very densely populated, forced by size, inclination and the necessity of trade to be international, though lately rather inward looking. There is not enough land to serve as a counterweight to the cities. That makes for a rather special society. The language is spoken by 21 million sometimes conceited citizens, with opinions about practically everything, in an eternal dialogue with each other.

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. Death, I had learned, was nothingness, and if that was the state you were in, as I had also learned, all deliberation ceased. So that was not the state I was in, since I was still full of musings, thoughts, memories. And evidently I was still somewhere: pretty soon it would also become apparent that I could walk, look around, eat (the sweetish mother’s-milk-and-honey taste of those little buns the Portuguese have for breakfast lingered in my mouth for hours). And I was able to pay with real money. This last, as far as I was concerned, was the most convincing evidence of all. You wake up in a room in which you did not go to bed, but your wallet is lying as it should on a chair beside your bed. That I was in Portugal I already knew, though I had gone to bed in Amsterdam as usual

The clue to the book is here in the opening to the book.

This book focuses on one Dutchman, a classic teacher of Latin and Greek. Herman Mussert. But what happens is that he falls asleep in Amsterdam. Still, then a few seconds later, he is awake at the end of Europe in Lisbon; when he awakes in a room many years earlier, he had an affair with a fellow teacher’s wife, a knock-on effect in his life that led to him losing his job and taking a career in later life as a travel writer. As Mussert drifts through Lisbon he rcalls the events of his life. As he does, he bumps into a form student. At this point, he starts to resound the following story, which is the story Cees has told us, so we have a book that is Mobius loop end where it started or ending where it started, so to speak.

I must get out of this room! Which room? This one here, this room in Lisbon. Socrates is scared, Di Strabo doesn’t dare show his face, Herman Mussert doesn’t know whether he has been registered at the reception.

“Who’s that funny-looking guy?” “Which room is he in?” “Have you entered his name?”

Nothing of the sort happens. I gather up my green Michelin, my map of Lisbon. Everything was to hand, naturally. Travellers’ cheques, escudos in my wallet, someone loves me, ipsa sibi virtus praemium.* And the fear was unfounded, for the radiant nymph to whom I give my key envelops me with the brilliance of her eyes and says : “Bom dia, Doctor Mussert.” August, the imperial month. The pale blue remnants of the wisteria, the shaded patio, the stone steps descending, the same doorman stewed in twenty years of slowly passing time.

As he awakes and finds his away around Lisbon.

This is a masterpiece of two seconds of a man’s life as this story is the last moments glimpsed in a dying man’s eye, and in Cee’s style, it has his love of travel of the classical world of romance and is very Dutch as well. What I loved about this book is that it has so many ideas and strands in it as we follow those last moments of the life of this classic teacher and his life and events. And things that were important and memorable in his life, from that affair to his subjects to the travel writing. This is all squeezed into an espresso-like shot of a book that, like a coil, starts as it ends, and we follow those last moments. I was reminded of the film Pulp Fiction, as this is how my neurodiverse mind works. Hold on with me on this one, as that film ends with John Travolta still alive as, in reality, he is dead, and this book is like that. The hints Herman is dead and this is just a blink of an eye in a dying man. Have you read this book or any other by Cees?  I always think he would make a good Nobel winner.

Winston’s score – a little gem of a book that ciils and twists as a story but in your mind after you have read it.