Dutch author Cees Nooteboom, tireless traveler of European reminiscence, dies at 92 | Culture | EUROtoday

Cees Nooteboom, some of the vital Dutch writers within the Netherlands, died this Wednesday on the age of 92, as confirmed by his Dutch writer, De Bezige Bij. The creator, who was very profitable overseas together with his journey tales, coated all literary genres till he was very outdated, and lived a part of the 12 months at his house in Menorca. Author of reviews, diaries, collections of tales, essays, artwork and criticism and, after all, novels, he thought-about himself above all a poet. Especially as a result of poetry of their language is just not normally some of the translated. He collaborated with EL PAÍS on numerous events.

Born in The Hague as Cornelis Johannes Jacobus Maria Nooteboom in 1933, he was despatched to non secular colleges in different cities: Venray and Eindhoven. His Catholic upbringing would later be mirrored in his work, and after working in an workplace after ending highschool, he found his love for touring and writing in his twenties. His first novel, Philip and the othersis from 1955. A couple of years later he debuted in poetry with The lifeless are in search of a house. With his story of the Hungarian Revolution of 1956, he started a sequence of reviews that he mixed with poems and novels. His most well-known work, titled rituals, It portrays the sixties in Amsterdam via characters who face existence in a unique and painful manner. Nooteboom steadily seemed like a candidate for the Nobel Prize in literature, and he took care of organizing his literary legacy till the final second. In 2004, he received the PC Hooft award, an important nationwide literature award.

For his first associate, the Dutch singer Liesbeth List, he wrote lyrics for her songs. The photographer Simone Sassen, with whom he lived till his demise, took the photographs for his books. He spent the final stage of his life along with her in Menorca, in line with the Dutch media.

In an electronic mail, Isabel Clara Lorda, the Spanish translator of her final 15 books, revealed by Ediciones Siruela, acknowledges being heartbroken by Nooteboom’s demise. “He has been present in my life since childhood and was a friend of my parents,” he says. The former director of the Cervantes Institute in Utrecht, additionally remembers that she met Nooteboom once more “in Amsterdam, Menorca or Barcelona, ​​when the opportunity arose.” Since he had been sick for a while, the final time they communicated was final 12 months, “when he called me to congratulate me on my birthday.” He says that afterwards “it was very difficult to talk to him and I could only do it with Simone, his wife.”

The translator explains that the publication of a compilation of all her articles on Spain, from the Nineteen Fifties to the current, “is planned for this summer and the title, also planned, will be Endless Spain. Chronicles of a traveleragain with Siruela. And he admits that, by having translated his work into Spanish, “this has meant that in some way I have appropriated his thoughts, his voice, his irony, his love for our land,” in an extended psychological journey.

Something curious occurred with Nooteboom’s work: whereas critics in his homeland weren’t very type, he was typically awarded overseas. He received the European Prize for Literature, and the Austrian State Prize for Foreign Literature. Although he is likely to be offended sooner or later, he accepted the criticism with out being intimidated, and in an interview revealed in 1998 by the newspaper NRC, responded the next: “Writing is, after all, postponed mortality.”