Cees Nooteboom (1933–2026)

Hermann Mussert wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon that he visited twenty years previous, despite having gone to sleep in his room in Amsterdam the night before. Clearly all is not as it seems, which prompts the question what is as it seems. And the answer to that traces the course of a life, which Mussert pursues in hopes of recalling himself to himself. Most recently he has been a writer of travel books under the name ‘Dr Strabo’. But before that he had been a teacher of Latin and show more Greek in a high school in Holland. None of which explains how it is he has woken up in Lisbon. But Mussert knows enough to know it probably has something to do with love.

Thereafter he intersperses recollections of Lisbon with his time teaching and of the woman with whom he fell in love. It is a complicated tale of love and revenge made more so by the fact that Maria Zienstra, his lover, is a biology teacher at the school and her temperament — rational and exacting — couldn’t be more different from his own. There is also the unfortunate fact that she only agrees to a liaison with him to spite her husband, who is having an affair with one of the students at the school. In the second half of the book it becomes more probable that Mussert is in a kind of limbo which he imagines as a voyage on a ship from Portugal to Brazil. The culmination of the journey will lead to his transfiguration. But for that to occur, he will have to be able to tell his story to its end.

For a slim volume, this is intensely rich writing. It is soaked in classical allusions and direct reference and quotation (for which translations are provided). Nooteboom handles the depth with surety and lightness. Mussert’s teaching methods are mesmerizing and the way in which they contrast with those of the biology teacher are stark. But it is the enigmatic figure of the brilliant young female student, Lisa d’India, that sets the action alight. Muse or siren? Or innocent? It is marvellous writing that positively demands rereading.

Highly recommended. show less

Former classics teacher Herman Mussert ("Sokrates" to his students and colleagues) wakes up in a familiar Lisbon hotel room, a room he had stayed in in the course of an extramarital affair some twenty years earlier. Which is fine, except that he's sure he went to sleep the evening before in his own apartment in Amsterdam.

It soon becomes clear that this trip — if it is a trip — has nothing to do with Mussert's current job as a hack writer of guidebooks to foreign places for ignorant show more Dutch tourists (obviously Nooteboom making gentle fun of his own work as a travel writer) and everything to do with that long-ago affair with biology teacher Maria, which in turn was connected to an affair between Maria's partner Arendt and Mussert's star pupil Lisa. But we have to work our way through quite a lot of Ovid, Plato, Horace, planetary science and entomology — as well as a few passing references to Pessoa — before we can start to get a clear picture of what's going on. It's all quite elegant, but Nooteboom works far more slowly and methodically than I would have thought possible in the space of a 96-page novella, so there are moments towards the middle of the book when you've seen where it's going and you feel you ought to start screaming "just get on with it!". I suppose it would be good training for reading Hermann Broch... show less

Anybody reading these words probably knows the Dutch poet and novelist Cees Nooteboom is one of the finest literary writers living in the world today. In the spirit of freshness, I would like to make several observations about this very short novel and the author in light of what 19th century German philosopher, Arthur Schopenhauer, has to say about aesthetics and the art of the novel.

In the very first line of this short novel, Herman Mussert, the narrator and main character, tells us, "I show more have never had an exaggerated interest in my own person, but unfortunately that did not imply I could stop thinking about myself at will, from one moment to the next." Indeed, Mussert is not interested in himself as a flesh-and-blood man of action; quite the opposite, he surrounds himself with books and reads all the time.

Within the first few pages, it becomes clear Mussert's world is the world of words. We read: "Words of polished marble drive out the most evil fumes." And to have such polish, Musset's words can't be the modern words ordinary people use in day-to-day conversation; rather, he goes on to tell us, "Our modern languages are altogether too wordy, look at any bilingual edition: on the left the spare, measured Latin phrases, the sculptured lines, on the right the full page, the traffic jam, the jumble of words, blathering chaos."

Let's pause and reflect on how such a life relates to Schopenhauer's aesthetics. For Schopenhauer, aesthetic experience happens when we rise above our preoccupation with our own will, our own individual survival, and, using art as a medium, observe the material, mundane world from a conceptual distance. For example: instead of participating in an actual love affair, we go to an art museum and stand before a painting of two people in love and behold the ideas (love, passion, yearning, attraction) the artist is portraying, and thus, as objective observers, we develop a clear, painless understanding of the dynamics of human emotion.

Of course, such objective observation is precisely what Herman Mussert experiences with his immersion in Ovid, Tacitus, Cicero and other ancient writers. At one point he reflects: "Whenever (I take off my glasses) I feel like a tortoise without a shell. That is to say, in the intimate proximity of the female body I am the most defenseless of creatures. Which explains why I kept largely aloof from those activities which everyone is always going on about and which, to me, have more to do with the animal kingdom than with human beings who concern themselves with less tangible aspects of existence."

However, Mussert tells us he lost his objectivity once when he was thirty years old in Lisbon. "Now for once I belonged to the ranks of ordinary people, the mortals, the rest, because I was in love with Maria Zeinstra." A married woman driven to avenge her husband's infidelity, Maria pulls Herman down from his aesthetic crow's nest and thrusts him into the nitty-gritty of a passionate affair. "And so now I was in love, and thus a member of the same weak, glutinous fraternity of one-track-minded automatons which I have always claimed to despise." Schopenhauer would nod his head, understanding how the raw forces of the universe are too powerful for us to escape completely; aesthetic distance happens at points in our lives, it is not a permanent state.

And Mussert's passionate affair has dire consequences. He relays how on one sunny afternoon he was dragged out to the playground by Maria's enraged husband and became a public spectacle, beaten up and humiliated in plain sight of everyone - students, teachers, administrators. For a man who lives his life at an aesthetic distance, a distance he creates through his books and ancient literature, this is a complete role reversal. For once Mussert is the actor on life's stage and all those ordinary mortals he despises get to be the spectators. Is it any wonder years later he wakes up in Lisbon having gone to bed the night before in Amsterdam? Such an experience would certainly make a deep impression on a sensitive man of letters predisposed to live his life in solitude, reading, surrounded by his books.

According to Schopenhauer, drama, being a superb reflection of human existence, can show life unfolding in three ways: 1) what is merely interesting, 2) what is sentimental, and 3) what is tragic. Specifically on the tragic, Schopenhauer's words are: "At the highest and hardest stage the tragic is aimed at: grievous suffering, the misery of existence is brought before us, and the final outcome is here the vanity of all human striving." Cess Nooteboom echoes Schopenhauer's tragic sense when he has Mussert reflect on a photograph taken by the Voyager at six billion kilometers away from the earth, "That sort of thing does not impress me. My tiny lifespan, the utter insignificance of my existence, they are no more microscopic for being viewed from such a distance."

Respecting the writing of novels, here is a Schopenhauer quote: "A novel will be the higher and nobler the more inner and less outer life it depicts . . . The art lies in setting the inner life into the most violent motion with the smallest possible expenditure of outer life; for it is the inner life which is the real object of our interest - The task of the novelist is not to narrate great events but to make small ones interesting." The Following Story is a tour de force of the inner life. And Mr. Nooteboom makes the small events in Mussert's life not only interesting for the reader but deeply probing and profound.

*The above Schopenhauer quotes are from `Arthur Schopenhauer -- Essays and Aphorisms' published by Penguin Books and translated by R.J. Hollingdale. show less

Nadat hij het goed deed als eerste boekenlijstroman, heb ik hem ditmaal voor de tweede keer gelezen. Bewonderenswaardig, sterk in nagenoeg elk aspect. Het is een verhaal doordrenkt met, zoals de titel al doet vermoeden, verschillende rituelen; variërend van Christelijke gebruiken tot de uitvoering van de Japanse theeceremonie. De ceremonie is dan ook een terugkerend thema, evenals de tijd (en het omgaan daarmee) en de zelfverkozen dood.

Er zijn drie belangrijke hoofdpersonen in het verhaal show more waarvan één, de verteller, Inni Wintrop: een alles en iedereen observerend personage, op een vreemde manier betrokken bij het leven maar toch niet echt eraan deelnemend. Dan komen vader en zoon Taads nog aan bod: beiden gekweld door een zelf opgelegde extreme eenzaamheid, buitenstaanders van een wereld die zij, elk op hun eigen, totaal verschillende maar in essentie gelijke manier haten en zoveel mogelijk proberen te ontvluchten. De personages hebben ieder een eigenaardige, zelfs krampachtige manier van omgaan met de tijd: waar vader Arnold Taads zijn leven exact op de klok inricht staat de tijd voor zijn zen-extremistische zoon eerder stil, terwijl Inni leeft in een wirwar van verleden en toekomst waarbij het heden eigenlijk het enige is waar hij grip op heeft (of beter gezegd, wat hij bevatten kan).

De omgeving die Cees Nooteboom schetst spreekt erg tot de verbeelding, het boek is doordrenkt van vergelijkingen, associaties en verstopte verwijzingen.
Één van de beste boeken die ik ooit in mijn handen heb gehad. show less