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marc129 's review for:
The Following Story
by Cees Nooteboom
The reviews on Goodreads make clear that this little book leaves no one indifferent: some find it purely drivel, others appreciate it as an ingenious work. I tend to the latter.
The negative comments probably are related to the confusion the reader has to undergo, whilst reading this novel. Nooteboom starts with presenting us a rather clumsy teacher of ancient languages in a college in Amsterdam, suddenly waking up in a room in Lisbon; then the author jumps through space and time, he drags in a platonic lovestory with a 16-year old student and a real, though very short, affair with a revengeful collegue-teacher; and in the second half of the book he steps on a boat in Lisbon, to make an imagined crossover to Brasil in the company of 6 people, obviously bifurcations of his own personallity.
To the experienced reader this short summary already makes clear there are lots of references to Kafka, Pessoa, Conrad and Zweig. The main character also raves about Latin and especially the work of Ovid. And then there are the philosophical reveries on time and reality, although they are much more elaborate in Nootebooms later work 'All Souls', but then situated in Berlin.
In short, there is a lot to find in this 90-page book, and in that sense you may say it is rather virtuoso, and quite in line with the postmodernism of the end of the last century. It is not one of Nootebooms best, but well worth reading.
The negative comments probably are related to the confusion the reader has to undergo, whilst reading this novel. Nooteboom starts with presenting us a rather clumsy teacher of ancient languages in a college in Amsterdam, suddenly waking up in a room in Lisbon; then the author jumps through space and time, he drags in a platonic lovestory with a 16-year old student and a real, though very short, affair with a revengeful collegue-teacher; and in the second half of the book he steps on a boat in Lisbon, to make an imagined crossover to Brasil in the company of 6 people, obviously bifurcations of his own personallity.
To the experienced reader this short summary already makes clear there are lots of references to Kafka, Pessoa, Conrad and Zweig. The main character also raves about Latin and especially the work of Ovid. And then there are the philosophical reveries on time and reality, although they are much more elaborate in Nootebooms later work 'All Souls', but then situated in Berlin.
In short, there is a lot to find in this 90-page book, and in that sense you may say it is rather virtuoso, and quite in line with the postmodernism of the end of the last century. It is not one of Nootebooms best, but well worth reading.