Book Review: "The Following Story" by Cees Nooteboom

This was the last book I read of 2020 and honestly, it was well worth it. It’s a fairly short book and possibly has no more than 100 or so pages. It’s about a man who has an existential crisis when he cannot figure out what he was doing the night before as he wakes up with a woman that is not his wife or girlfriend in a place he does not remember being. In most aspects, this novel starts like a lot of novels do since the main character is seen in media res and does not know what to expect later on. However, the difference is that this character here cannot seem to remember who he is underneath. On this journey, we see him search on the outside and on the inside for who he really is. Exploring everything from details about his past to the deep philosophical questions in our own searches for the meaning to our lives. In the end, do we ever really get an answer or is it just more questions? Cees Nooteboom attempts to give you an ending that will leave you wholly satisfied but keep your mind turning about possibility. In this work, there are things that we can interpret as being the answers to identity - the question of what individualism really is poses a threat to the way in which we see ourselves as a part of a group - a family for example. This man here cannot seem to find his own sense of grouping and so, it may be that very individualism, the fact he is centred on himself, that is paradoxically holding him back.

Various quotations from the book show us different things about the philosophical discovery this character goes on and I would like to share my favourites here:

“I 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. And that morning I certainly had something to think about. Another man might have resorted to a talk about life and death, but such weighty words do not come easily to my lips, even when there is no one else there, as was then the case. 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 tat 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 and memories.”

Obviously there is an oxymoron here in which he states he does not want to talk about life and death because the ideas don’t come easily to the lips and then continues to talk about death and whether he is dead or alive, evidently discussing life and death. He proves that existence of the self is impossible to talk about without mentioning whether the person is at the least, dead or alive as the simplest idea of the problem he is going through here.

“Self-control, is alas, something I have always had in good measure, or I might have shouted out loud and whoever the other one was, he was of the same bent, and kept in peace. In short, whoever it was lying there decided to ignore his or my speculations and devote himself to the task of remembering, and since he, himself to the task of remembering and since, whoever it was, referred to himself as “I” in that room in Lisbon, which of course I recognised with devilish precision, I remembered the following: the evening of a bachelor in Amsterdam cooking his own supper which in my case amounts to opening a tin of beans.”

This one differs as it does not go through life and death per se, but instead identifies the difference between these two individuals and therefore, they are not part of the same group. Later on, the narrator seeks to make himself look like the ‘better’ of the two. It is common in human nature to do so - especially if the narrator is male.

To conclude, the short length of this book is the reason it loses a mark since I don’t think that the ideas it explores can be properly fleshed out in a book so short. But the writing style definitely makes up for that in places it can.