Cees Nooteboom - The Following Story

Herman Musset, a quiet, introverted teacher of Latin and Greek, and who spends all of his time reading. He writes travel guides under the name of Dr Strabo, and calls it 'a moronic activity whereby I earn my living'. In his spare time - when he is not reading - he translates Ovid's Metamorphosis, a translation he wants nobody to see because, 'Our modern languages are altogether too wordy...the traffic jam, the jumble of words, blathering chaos.'

He falls asleep one night in his home in Amsterdam, and awakens in Lisbon, twenty years previous. He is unsure if he is dead, or has been transported back through time, or whether he is hallucinating. Or, maybe, some other possibility that he cannot imagine. All he knows is that the room he woke up in, the room in Lisbon, is the very same place where he slept with another man's wife.

In waking up in this room, he remembers the actions of all those years ago and the people that were affected. Lisa d'India, a talented, beautiful student, he remembers the best. She was loved by all for her intelligence, loved by Herman for the ideal she represented. He admired her, appreciated her skill with Greek, but he did not love her in the carnal sense, the way every else seemed to. For Herman, sexual love '[has] more to do with the animal kingdom than with human beings, who concern themselves with the less tangible aspects of existence.'

Lisa d'India is loved, most especially, by Arend Herfst, a poet and basketball teacher. He begins a relationship with the girl, and it seems that everyone but Herman is aware of this. Arend's wife, Maria Zeinstra, begins an affair with Herman, an affair of revenge, not love or lust, and Herman is completely unaware of this fact. Happily, the plot never moves into confusing betrayals or empty, 'romantic' gestures. Instead, we follow the events through the absent-minded, bewildered eyes of Herman. His affair with Maria Zeinstra, an affair that he did not plan and did not really want, is somewhat beyond his talents in people interaction. He does not know how to handle her, and luckily, does not have to. Herman is used merely as a piece in the strategy game that husband and wife are playing. Yet, Maria's relationship with Herman is not malicious, as far as we can tell, and is oftentimes quite gentle.

The clandestine cum love story plot is one that can easily be ignored, and indeed is for most of the novel. The true focus is Herman. He is an amazing character, a learned, intelligent, gentle man, who is 'as ugly as Socrates'. He quotes Ovid, Tacitus and Shakespeare in his meandering confessions, he considers this philosophy or that author, wonders about the state of art and culture, comments on everything with a wry wink to the reader. Herman is a man who enjoys words more than anything else in this world, he enjoys reading them and - while he considers his own talents to be of a poor quality, and useless when compared to the Latin and Greek greats - he loves writing down his thoughts. Through the sarcasm and the negativity towards popular culture, there is a timid yet kind man who just wants to love his books in peace.

An explanation for Herman's sleeping in Amsterdam and awakening in Lisbon twenty years earlier is given, but I will not reveal it. Towards the end of the novel, when Herman has relived the most vivid, alive experience of his life, when he has finished recounting an episode when the real world intrudes on his careful, closed existence of words and rhyme, he boards a ship, travelling with six other people, swapping dream-like stories of time and reality. In this section, the sardonic, witty narrator - Herman - all but disappears, replaced with a lazily beautiful chronicler of events of the mind. The transition is seamless and works very well, building up a sort of confused, dreamy tension until the last two amazing pages, and then the final, perfect sentence when the cloud of unanswered questions are blown away and we are left with a brilliant clarity and understanding.

Author	Cees Nooteboom
Title	The Following Story (Original Title: Het volgende verhaal)
Translator	Ina Rilke
Nationality	Dutch
Publisher	Mariner Books
Published	1994 (English) 1991 (Dutch)
Pages	128
Availability: ---Amazon (US)

See Also

Other titles by Cees Nooteboom under review include:
---All Souls' Day
---In the Dutch Mountains