An existence on the edge of oblivion

INNI WINTROP, "one of those people who drag the time they have spent on earth behind them like an amorphous mass", lives a life of such measured sensitivities that he is at best barely alive, so it is not very surprising when he decides to follow the advice in a magazine horoscope which he has written himself and attempts suicide. Cees Nooteboom's absurdist, offbeat novella, Rituals (Harvill, £7.99 in UK), was first published in Holland in 1980, and although it was translated into English and published by the Louisiana State University Press in 1983, this is the belated first British edition of a truly strange, funny and clever work by one of European fiction's more original imaginations.

Considering that the central character has such a slender grasp on existence, it is only to be expected that when he does achieve some semblance of life it is through the stories of other people, such as an estranged father and son whom he meets independently of each other at either end of a twenty year period.

Inni is far more passive than Mussert, the narrator of Nooteboom's award winning novel of ideas, The Following Story (1992 English translation 1994). Whereas that book was dominated by the personality of a narrator anxious to tell his own story, Inni drifts through Rituals with about as much sense of purpose as a sleepwalker.

The narrative begins in the middle. It is 1963 and Inni's six year marriage to Zita has ended. Together they appear to have been engaged in a mutual trance. Apart from each other, they hardly exist. Both as individuals and as a couple, the only real act they engage in is sex. Aside from inventing horoscopes, Inni is distinguished solely by his inability to spend the night alone, and "by possessing a bit of money, and by sometimes having visions" as for political convictions "of whatever colour he regarded [them] as more or less mild forms of mental illness". Inni is also "ready to hate himself at any moment of the day on request if need be If he had ever any ambition, he would have been prepared to call himself a failure, but he had none." About the most important, and, ultimately, the most tragic quality Inni possesses is the gift of survival. Whereas the other characters live and die, he merely survives.

None of this sounds very promising for a novel. The opening sequence of Rituals succeeds almost exclusively through the exactitude of Nooteboom's prose and his epigrammatic observations. By the end of this part, it is clear that the passage of time rather than life is going to be the central force in this book time, and the tendency of several of the characters to attempt suicide at least once.

Moving ten years farther back into the pact to 1953, Inni, already a passive observer, begins to witness the strangeness of life at a relatively early age. His aged Aunt The rise decides he must meet one of her former lovers Arnold Taads. They journey together to the meeting. In his innocence [Inni] still thought that her excitement was perhaps caused by certain mysterious chemical processes somewhere in that white, slightly bloated body, as if a sauce pan full of her blood was constantly on the boil on an internal stove if she had not regularly heaved one of her big sighs she would surely have exploded. She fills in the many gaps in Inni's background by sketching the history of the family responsible for producing him

"All Wintrops are mad, wicked, vain, they lack discipline, they all live in confusion, they are constantly getting divorced. They treat their wives like cattle and yet these women remain in love with them, they are on the wrong side in the war or they make money out of it, they are crafty in business, but they gamble their money away or throw it in the air, and they'll sell one another for a few pence. "Did you ever know your father?"

Despising both humanity at large and himself in particular, Taads, an anti social, one eyed former champion downhill skier imagine that, a Dutch downhill skier hates all forms of life, except his dog. His grimly philosophical monologues are all concerned with promoting a doctrine of non life.

Twenty years later, in 1973, Inni meets up by chance with an otherworldly eccentric who appears to believe the only possible justification for his entire existence in the possession of an elusive and extremely rare ancient tea bowl the resulting despairingly philosophical monologues are terrifyingly familiar. Of course, the monk like Philip is Taad's neglected son.

Rituals operates through ritualised routines whether the subject is sex, tea making, quests, or the burial of a dead dove, the narrative structure is deliberately formal and cleverly balances the plot's many absurdities.

Still, while The Following Store, with its beguiling use of the enduring pain of memory and its awareness of disillusionment and of death, offers a wider range of possibilities, Inni's story succeeds mainly through its artifice, the juxtaposing of the tragic father and son and their respective deaths. For all the laughs along the way, this slighter book, with its self hating characters, is more unsettling though less challenging. Nooteboom obviously belongs to that peculiarly European tradition of determinedly cerebral, intellectual game playing fiction. Yet he is closer to the humane vision of the French writer George Perec than he is to that of Calvino.

Somehow in the midst of the philosophy and the gags, a note of genuine tragedy is struck when Philip finally does locate the rare Chinese bowl he has spent so much of his existence pursuing. Rizenkamp the art dealer who sells it to him prophetically comments to his friend Inni of Philip. "There was just one thing he wanted all these years and now he has got it. Now he has nothing more to want.

Cautionary and elegant. Rituals a book which one likes without really knowing why and it seems this ambiguity lies at the centre of the artistic intentions governing Nooteboom's characteristically elegiac cunning little curio.