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The Following Story
Cees Nooteboom
Translated by Ina Rilke
Harvest Books
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Let us start by agreeing on a few things: that Cees Nooteboom writes with a grace that legitimates the assurance found in The Following Story , an assurance that might sound presumptuous in a lesser book; that small books are often considered slight, but that when each word is placed with as much precision as in this book, the outcome is substantial; that when a novel's schematics leave the right level of ambiguity, a book will necessarily draw a reader back for the pleasure of reading everything a second time. The plot is as follows: a Dutchman named Herman Mussert wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon. he has no idea how he reached the hotel, but he knows the room well because he "had slept there twenty years ago with another man's wife." As he heads out to reconnoiter his surroundings the story of the affair unfolds: Mussert, his love (Maria Zeinstra), and the love's wife were all teachers at a private school in Amsterdam; Mussert, an ugly misanthrope ("I must get out of this bathroom; my own presence is becoming oppressive"), finds his first and last love in Zeinstra, but in a climactic scene it all unravels. There's a fourth personal involved in the affair as well: a young, beautiful, female student who herself is having an affair with Zeinstra's husband. Everything ends badly. All three lose their jobs, and the narrator ends up ghostwriting travel guides for a living. Thus ends our backstory. From Lisbon, the narrator boards a ship with six other companions. They cross the Atlantic and head up the Amazon deep into South America where it slowly becomes evident that everyone on the boat is dead. | |
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