In Rituale — Rituals to give the book its English title — Cees Nooteboom begins in the middle, goes back to the beginning, and then skips a bit to get to something of an ending. As middle beginnings that might well be endings go, the first sentence in Rituals is arresting: “On the day that Inni Wintrop committed suicide, the stock for Philips was at 149.60.” (p. 9) The rest of the first paragraph goes on to muse that “memory is like a dog that lays down wherever it wants,” that if Inni was going to remember anything at all, it was that “the moon shone on the nearby canal, and that he had hanged himself in his bathroom” because of what he had written in the horoscope for Leos in the newspaper Het Parool, that their wife would run off with someone and that they would then kill themselves.

Nooteboom then moves back from that fateful day in 1963 to show some of how Inni and Zita came to know each other, came to be married. Inni has enough money that he makes his living partly by investing in the financial markets and partly as an art middleman, selling works onward to the people who actually sell to collectors. He and Zita had built a bit of a life together, she pursuing her interests and he keeping life interesting enough while also pursuing plenty of casual affairs. Inni had cried the first time they made love, but their life together was not enough to change his fundamental distance from nearly everything.

Years had passed since the night that Inni had cried on the steps of the Palace of Justice. Zita and Inni had eaten and drunk and had traveled. Inni had lost money in nickel and made money form watercolors of The Hague school. He had written horoscopes and recipes for Elegance. Zita had almost had a child, but this time Inni could not repress his fear of change and ordered the entrance to the world, which in the end did not interest him either, to be closed. With that action he had sealed the greatest change of all; namely, that Zita would leave him. Inni only noticed the first shadows: her skin dried out, sometimes her eyes looked past him, and she said his name less often. But he only associated these signs with her fate, not with his. (p. 11)

This introduction makes Rituals seem a sadder book than it is. It’s both funnier and stranger, as the next two sections reveal. The first, “Intermezzo,” ends with Inni realizing his suicide attempt has failed, and the reader realizing that the day in question was the day of Kennedy’s assassination.

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