His last memory had been falling asleep the night before in his Amsterdam apartment, but now he has Portuguese currency in his wallet and room service finds nothing strange in his ordering breakfast.

The only audience left to him, apart from the readers of the book, is the woman - now revealed as his former star student, Lisa d'India - to whom he relates "the following story".

The reviewer in The Independent (UK) noted that the novel had won the European Literary Prize and that it was likely to appeal to philosophers and scientists alike, as well as to both classicists and followers of modern literature: Yet beyond the learning so wittily displayed, there is something deeper that might speak to anyone: a voyage around memory and death, myth and disillusionment.

[5] In the essay "Memoirs of the Undead" that Douglas Glover devoted to the novel, it is noted that one of its points of departure is Ambrose Bierce's story "An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge", with its similar narrative of a man's illusion of escaping his hanging even as it takes place.

[6] According to this reading, the entire action of Nooteboom's book is packed into the two seconds that it takes Mussert to die in his Amsterdam apartment, the clues to which begin on the very first page.

The allied theme of eternal recurrence, rather than linear progression, is discussed by other characters, the whole leading towards the final page in which the audience he addresses is returned to the moment of his death at the start, at which "the following story" begins.