The Following Story

A slim, philosophical, beautifully-written novel by one of Europe's most brilliant living writers and winner of the European Literature Prize

The prose has such clarity, charm and lightness that you take to disorientation with pleasure

After years of distinction in his own country, Cees Nooteboom has commanded attention with this gentle, European Literature Prize-winning story

He is a thinker as much as a storyteller and brings astute insight to his evocation of character and imaginative intellectualism... Playful, deadly serious and achingly real... Nooteboom makes every word, every observation, not only count but also linger

Nooteboom writes beautifully. His prose is clean and precise without feeling sparse, and he manages to combine clarity with an intense lyricism… Part travelogue, part elegy, part love story, this is an exquisite little novel, and far more substantial than its 90 pages suggest

Sharp, elegant prose... It recalls, in tone, Vladimir Nabokov. The language is, by turns, delicately allusive and rich, even ripely comic

He writes a speculative, playful, diversionary fiction that is never necessarily set where it says it is set

Nooteboom's traceries of love, identity, knowledge, death and transfiguration have seldom seemed more evocative

Nooteboom has shown himself a master of ironic wisdom, but also of elated, elegiac feeling. Intricately composed and finely translated, The Following Story will still be delivering after many readings

It has a compelling energy and rare elegance to equal its extraordinary ambitions... The Following Story is several times more valuable than the usual fare, and a book that earns more than one reading

Cees Nooteboom was born in The Hague in 1933. He is a poet and the author of several novels and travel books. He has journeyed through much of the world - he made his first voyage as a sailor to earn his passage from his native Holland to South America, and he has been travelling ever since. His first taste of international success was the Pegasus Prize for Rituals. The award in 1993 of the European Literature Prize, for The Following Story, confirmed his reputation in contemporary European world literature. His other works, including In the Dutch Mountains and A Song of Truth and Semblance, have been translated into many languages.

WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY DAVID MITCHELL 
 
One morning Herman Mussert wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon, where twenty years previously he slept with another man’s wife. Yet he is quite certain that the night before he went to sleep as normal in his house in Amsterdam. And so Herman begins a physical journey and a metaphysical adventure, which will re-route him via past loves, through the pangs and pleasures of memory, and to the very heart of that crucial question: ‘who am I?’.

Lost Paradise

A wonderfully charming and mystical fable about angels, Australia and love.

A charming, sinuous, playful novel...global, universal, in its scope and feeling

Nooteboom writes beautifully. His prose is clean and precise without feeling sparse, and he manages to combine clarity with intense lyricism

A plot as finely tuned as a concert piano...this is a novel which finally soars

Nooteboom has shown himself a master of ironic wisdom, but also of elated, elegiac feeling

Nooteboom's books are tiny bombs capable of exploding in the imagination of any reader open to adventure

Nooteboom is one of the greatest modern novelists

The dense, layered, magical and innovative fictions of Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, who was born in 1933, are always different...superb,elegant and vivid

The Dutch grandmaster at the height of his powers

Cees Nooteboom's new novel is inhabited by angels. Paradise seems to be in Australia, while hell is in São Paulo. Nooteboom has effortlessly reworked his travel stories into a surprising variation on an old theme

A daring, poetic, provocative, cleansing novel

Cees Nooteboom was born in the Hague in 1933. He is a poet and the author of prize-winning fiction and travel books. In 1993 he won the Aristeion European Literature Prize for his novel The Following Story. His books have been translated into many languages.

Alma and Almut share a fascination for Australia and its ancient peoples; their ceremonies, sand drawings and body paintings. After Alma suffers a traumatic attack, they board a cheap flight from São Paulo to Sydney, and together begin their journey across their secret continent. Alma slowly recovers through a brief love affair with an Aboriginal artist, and both women become involved with the Angel Project in Perth, where actors dressed as angels are concealed around the city for the public to discover. 
 
In a seemingly unconnected story, a man staying at a remote Alpine spa unexpectedly meets a woman he encountered years before and with whom he shared a single night. It was in a faraway city and she was dressed as an angel...

Travels in Time and Space

Nomad's Hotel

A whimsical, hilarious, heartbreaking tour of the world from a writer A. S. Byatt has called 'one of the greatest modern novelists'.

This is a jewel of a travel book, free of pretension, full of easy adventure, fresh with childlike wonder for the world.

Some inimitable observations on life as she is lived

A traveller on a grand scale...beautifully crafted

As with all exceptional writers who itch to travel, his writing attains an almost imperceptible stream of consciousness, one that takes it far beyond the usual serendipitous wanderings

As he makes his guileful, sharp, provoking, seductive progress across the globe, he's prepared to free-fall into dreamlike appreciation of sensation, prepared to be frightened, prepared , too, to scrutinise, question, challenge, admit to ignorance.... The writing scintillates... His book is a compass of sorts, quite useless for aiding escape on a desert island, but, in augmenting the bible and Shakespeare in that locale, quite indispensable nonetheless

This absurdly enjoyable collection of travel pieces by one of the world's most entertaining writers takes us from the exotic by way of Gambia, Mali and Isfahan, to the seemingly domesticated vistas of Australia and Zurich, and finds poetry and beauty in them all. 
 
What marks this collection out as something different from an ordinary travel anthology are Nooteboom's meditations on what it means to travel and to be a traveller and his quest, like that of so many other explorers, to discover the perfect hotel. 
 
This is vintage Nooteboom; a book of immense range and depth, it is an illuminating record of a world class traveller's many discoveries and insights and perfect holiday, and armchair, reading.

Cees Nooteboom

Ina Rilke

One of the great books about Spain

His prose is as sturdy as a good Rioja, and equally delicious

With this immensely attractive book, Cees Nooteboom joins a select band of writer... who have the rare ability to evoke the soul of a nation. No one with a feeling for Spain should fail to read this book

Invites the reader to share the excitement, experiences, even food, that the author has encountered while weaving his way through [Spain] slowly and deliciously... Mr. Nooteboom lingers in out-of-the-way places most tourists miss

Nooteboom plunges fervently into the fabric of Spain itself

The erudition, ambition and resonance are reminiscent of Claudio Magris' magisterial Danube. But the voice - and, as he has rendered it, the territory - is Nooteboom's own

A many-tangented pilgrimage through ten centuries of Spain's history, its politics, its art, literature and architecture, its climate and its people, in which Nooteboom unlocks doors to an undiscovered Spain and reveals his obsession for a country he has come to know intimately over the course of forty years.

Cees Nooteboom

Praise for Roads To Santiago

One of the great books about Spain

His prose is as sturdy as a good Rioja, and equally delicious

With this immensely attractive book, Cees Nooteboom joins a select band of writer... who have the rare ability to evoke the soul of a nation. No one with a feeling for Spain should fail to read this book

One of the great books about Spain

His prose is as sturdy as a good Rioja, and equally delicious

With this immensely attractive book, Cees Nooteboom joins a select band of writer... who have the rare ability to evoke the soul of a nation. No one with a feeling for Spain should fail to read this book

One of the great books about Spain

His prose is as sturdy as a good Rioja, and equally delicious

With this immensely attractive book, Cees Nooteboom joins a select band of writer... who have the rare ability to evoke the soul of a nation. No one with a feeling for Spain should fail to read this book

Books by Cees Nooteboom

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