“The Following Story” by Cees Nooteboom (Netherlands)

Favourite Quotes

‘when women are out to get something, they are capable of mobilizing forces that men, for all their so-called strength of purpose, cannot match.’

Synopsis

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?’.

Nicola’s Creative Reading Group reading list

Year 5 – “Western Europe” (Oct 2010 – Jun 2011)

“The True Deceiver” by Tove Jansson (Finland/Sweden)
“The Withered Root” by Rhys Davies (U.K.-Wales)
“Loving Sabotage” by Amélie Nothomb (Belgium)
“The Following Story” by Cees Nooteboom (Netherlands)
“The Wall Jumper” by Peter Schneider (Germany)
“Women as Lovers” by Elfriede Jelinek (Austria)
“A Heart so White” by Javier Marias (Spain)
“If on a Winter’s Night a Traveller” by Italo Calvino (Italy)
“Zorba the Greek” by Nikos Kazantzakis (Greece)