The Following Story - Tapa blanda

"Nooteboom is one of the greatest modern novelists" (A.S. Byatt)

"The prose has such clarity, charm and lightness that you take to disorientation with pleasure" (Michael Ignatieff Sunday Times)

"Sharp, elegant prose... It recalls, in tone, Vladimir Nabokov. The language is, by turns, delicately allusive and rich, even ripely comic" (D. J. Enright Times Literary Supplement)

"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" (Ben Rogers Independent on Sunday)

"Nooteboom writes beautifully. His prose is clean and precise without feeling sparse, and he manages to combine clarity with intense lyricism - Part travelogue, part love story, this is an exquisite novel" (Rebecca Abrams Guardian)

Socrates is a former Classics teacher at a Dutch lycee; Dr Strabon is a renowned travel writer, revered by many a Dutch tourist as the ultimate authority on the world outside Holland; Alfred Mussert is a misanthrope, but he is also the man behind the masks of these other incongruous alter egos. Waking one morning to find himself in a seedy hotel room in Portugal and with the feeling that he is perhaps dead, Mussert wonders what has happened to bring him here when he is certain that he went to bed the night before in Amsterdam. Checking his reflection in the bathroom mirror, Socrates stares back at him and Mussart consequently looks back into his past questioning the whys and wherefores of his former lives and his one love.