Changes

|title=Rituals

|author=Cees Nooteboom

|publisher=MacLehose Press

|date=July 2013

|summary=Directionless Inni confronts the mysteries of the universe in the Amsterdam of the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s.

}}

''Rituals'' introduces us to Amsterdam, and to Inni, firstly in 1960, then in 1950, and then in the 1970s. When we first meet Inni, it is when he is a middle-aged man in 1960. Far from responsible and hard-working, we see him as someone who is impulsive and reckless, even to the point of cruelty to his wife - who formulates plans to leave him. It is only after this frankly miserable first impression that we meet the younger Inni, and we see how a chance meeting with a man called Arnold Taads had changed the course of his life. Taads is a man obsessed with matriculating his life down to the last second, letting time dictate what he can do, with whom he can do it with, and, most importantly, when. In Part three, in another chance meeting, the now ageing Inni meets Taads' son, Phillip. Phillip, though having never met his father, curiously lives a life that is an echo of his father's; though as Arnold isolated himself in the mountains, Phillip isolates himself in meditation and the methodology of the tea ceremony.

Thus - Nooteboom has made the plot of Rituals symmetrical. He has given it the ultimate order out of chaos. Perhaps Nooteboom is trying to suggest some theological irony that goes beyond the novel's pages. Indeed, Rituals does possess discourse on religion - as well as art, the economy, family, Amsterdam, sex, loneliness. It is evidence of Nooteboom's mastery that such a brief book contains such a small, yet perfectly structured universe. Highly recommended.

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