Time to Slow Down
As Rev. Piotr mentioned in his article, we are joining forces–he will chat about the influence of literary food in his articles, and I’ll chat about, well, other bookish things in mine! Our first book is “The Following Story” (originally Het volgende verhaal) by Cees Nooteboom, where rather then discuss the book, I thought I’d take a look at the person behind the words.
Over the years, the world has become increasingly noisy, yet Cees Nooteboom writing reflects a quieter path, which is something you may need right now. “The Following Story,” is a novella barely 100 pages long that dares to ask what does it mean ‘to be’?
Born in The Hague on July 31, 1933, Nooteboom grew up in a postwar Europe. He was educated in religious secondary schools, which he later credits for instilling a lifelong obsession with ritual, symbolism, and classical literature. These early influences would shape his work forever.
Over the years, Nooteboom never stayed put. He hitchhiked through Europe in his youth, spent decades living in Spain and traveling across the globe, taking in every language, museum, and ruin along the way. He began his career as a journalist and poet, and has published travel essays, literary criticism, poetry, novels, and even the occasional play, but while all different, what unites his work is a sense of wonder and mortality.
He writes slowly. Deliberately. And often in small doses. “The Following Story,” for example, reads like a dream: a retired classics teacher wakes up in a hotel room in Lisbon, though he went to bed in Amsterdam. Has he died? Is this a dream? A memory? Nooteboom never quite tells you, because that’s not the point. What matters is the in-between space—the story that follows.
Despite writing in Dutch, Nooteboom’s work has been translated into more than 30 languages. He’s won the prestigious European Literary Prize, among many others, and his name mentioned in Nobel Prize speculations. Still, he’s not one to chase fame. He prefers quiet islands, long walks, and long sentences. “I am not trying to say something new,” he once shared. “I am trying to say something true.” Maybe that’s why his books feel timeless? They’re not chasing trends.
Right now, when books aim to end of cliffhangers, or rush to the next chapter, his fiction asks us to slow down. To think. To sit with our uncertainty. For book clubs, his work is a gift: brief enough to read in a weekend, dense enough to talk about for weeks.
Some stories begin with a bang, “The Following Story” doesn’t. Instead, it opens with something quieter, yet no less gripping and in today’s fast-paced world, this may be the kind of stillness we need.
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