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Cees Nooteboom (b. 1933) |
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Dutch novelist, poet, travel-writer, and essayist. Cees Nooteboom has been mentioned as a contender for the Nobel Prize for literature. Central themes in his work are death, the mystery of the self, and the relationship between reality and imagination. A large part of Nooteboom's books consist of travel literature, but he considers himself foremost a poet. "It is impossible to prove and yet I believe it: there are some places in the world where one is mysteriously magnified on arrival or departure by the emotions of all those who have arrived and departed before. Anyone possessed of a soul so light feels a gentle tug in the air around the Schreierstoren, the Sorrowers' Tower in Amsterdam, which has to do with the accumulated sadness of those left behind. It is a sadness we do not experience today: our journeys no longer take years to complete, we know exactly where it is we are going, and our changes of coming back are so much greater." (Roads to Santiago by Cees Nootebom, translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1997, p. 3; translation of De omweg naar Santiago, 1992) Cees Nooteboom was born Cornelis Johannes Jacobus Maria Nooteboom in the Hague. At an early age, Nooteboom lost his father Hubertus Nooteboom, who died during a bombing raid in World War II. After his mother Johanna Pessers remarried in 1948, he was sent to convent schools run by Franciscan and Augustinian monks. Nooteboom never finished high school. "One fine day, and I know how romantic and old fashioned that sounds, but it was what happened in my case, I packed a rucksack, took leave of my mother, and caught the train to Breda. An hour later . . . I was standing at the side of the road on the Belgian border sticking my thumb in the air, and I have never really stopped since." (Nomad's Hotel: Travels in Time and Space, translated from the Dutch by Ann Kelland, Boston; Mariner Books, 2009, p. 6) A long hitchhiking trip through Europe inspired his first novel, Philip and the Others (1955). The book was awarded the Anne Frank Prize. De doden zoeken een huis, Nooteboom's first collection of poetyry, came out in 1956. In 1957, Nooteboom married Fanny Lichtveld. They divorced in 1954.
He had a long relationship with the singer and actress Elisabeth
Dorathea List, who collaborated with Mikis Theodorakis on an LP in
1967 and recorded cover versions of songs by such artists Jacquel Brel
and Gilbert Bécaud. In 1979 Nooteboom met the photographer
Simone Sassen, who became his life companion. From the beginning of his career,
Nooteboom has spent a nomadic life. His early
traveler's tales he wrote in the 1950s, when he was a merchant seaman with the Suriname Shipping Company. These
experiences have provided the background for his novels, in which the
characters explore the world and their inner self. Since 1963, he
has published a number of travel books. For the first time Nooteboom visited Spain in 1953. Eventually he started to divide his time between Amsterdam, Berlin, and the Spanish islands, where he has also written several of his works. A selection of Nooteboom's travel articles were later collected in Roads to Santiago (1992). "Although difficult to categorize," said Richard L. Kagan in his review, "it resembles a classic pilgrim's tale written for purposes of spiritual edification, a kind of Michelin for the soul." ('A Pilgrim's Progress,' The New York Times, April 6, 1997) In the 1960s Nooteboom worked as a columnist for the newspaper De Volkskrant. De Parijse beroerte
(1968), an account of the May Revolution of 1968 in Paris, brought him
the national journalism prize. In 1967 Nooteboom became the editor of
the travel and poetry sections of Avenue, one of Holland's largest magazines. Many of Nooteboom's books, such as Berlijnse notities (1990, Roads to Berlin), Roads to Santiago, Ultima Thule: een reis naar Spitsbergen (2008, Ultima Thule: A Journey to Spitsbergen), and 533: een dagenboek (2016, 533 Days) have been illustrated by Simone Sassen's photograps. Though Nooteboom has said that he is not religious, the pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela fascinated his imagination. But not a believer, he drove there by car. Nooteboom's novels are full of literary allusions and he uses conflicting narrative voices, typical postmodern techniques, but his work also has timeless quality outside particular literary fashion trends. In the mirror-like novel The Knight Has Died (1963) Nooteboom played like Jorge Luis Borges with the blurring boundaries between fictional characters and their creators, the authors. The protagonist composes a book about his dead friend, who was writing a novel about a writer, who had died before finishing his work. After The King Has Died Nooteboom did not publish another novel for seventeen years. During this period he focused mostly on travel articles and poetry. He has also translated works by such writers as Sean O'Casey, Brendan Behan, Vladimir Nabokov, and Pablo Neruda. Rituals (1980), which also attracted attention outside the Netherlands and was made into a film, contrasted order and chaos, life and nothingness. The hero Inni Wintrop does not follow any rules in his daily life. His friend Arnold Taads lives alone in a house where everything, except the day light, is arranged with mathematical precision. Taads's son Philip, who loves Japanese tea ceremonies, turns his back to the world adopting the lifestyle of an ascetic. Arnold freezes to death, Philip is found drowned. Unpredictability, not the inevitable death, Nooteboom seems to say, is at the core of our life. Transition and healing process are linked with Aboriginal thought systems in Lost Paradise (2004), in which a woman attempts to master a traumatic experience. Eventually she is able to overcome her fear of death by accepting that the Universe has its own intelligence. Nooteboom has received numerous prizes, including the 1982 Pegasus
Prize for Literature, the Multatuli Prize (1985) for the novel In the Dutch Mountains
(1984), and the Cristóbal Gabarrón Foundation International Literature
Award 2008. He has also been awarded the Prijs der Nederlandse
Letteren, the most prestigious literary award in the Dutch-speaking
world (2009). He has been named Honorary Doctor by several
universities, including the Catholic University of Brussels (1998), the
Radboud University Nijmegen (2006), and the
Freie Universität Berlin (2008). Nooteboom's work has been translated
into all the major European languages and several non-European
languages. Het volgende verhaal (1991,
The Following Story) won the prestigious European Literary Prize in
1993 for Best Novel. Basically the work is based on same idea as
Ambrose Bierce's short story 'An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,' in
which last moments before death are expanded into a whole life. "Death, I had learned, was nothingness, and if that was the state you were in, as I had also learned, all deliberation ceased. So that was not the state I was in, since I was still full of musings, thoughts, memories." (The Following Story, translated from the Dutch by Ina Rilke, New York: Harcourt Brace & Company, 1994, p. 3) Herman Mussert, a teacher, wakes up in Lisbon, feeling that he might be dead. Mussert recalls past memories and at the same time he is dying on his bed in Amsterdam – according to Nooteboom, the story covered the final two seconds of a man's life. ('Nooteboom, Cees,' in World Authors 1985-1990, edited by Vineta Colby, New York; H. W. Wilson Company, 1995, p. 610) At the end, he journeys up the Amazon, his river of Styx, toward the unnown.
Selected works:
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