Cees Nooteboom - Works

Novelist and poet, born in The Hague, W Netherlands. Educated at convent schools, he spent the greater part of his adolescence travelling through Europe. Elements of his travels are apparent in his debut novel Philip en de anderen (1955, Philip and the Others), but he became known as a literary journalist writing travel stories such as Een nacht in Tunesië (1965, A Night in Tunisia). He made his breakthrough as a novelist with Rituelen (1980, Rituals). As a poet, he began with experimental poetry full of associative imagery, but his work gradually became more sober in style. One of the few internationally acknowledged Dutch writers, his work has been translated into several languages, and he was awarded the Constantijn Huygensprijs in 1992.

Cees Nooteboom, born Cornelis Johannes Jacobus Maria Nooteboom, July 31, 1933, in the Hague, Netherlands is a Dutch author. (Het volgende verhaal won him the Aristeion Prize in 1993.)

"The world is a never-ending cross reference." -Cees Nooteboom

Works

A Song of Truth and Semblance (1981)

"When he later contemplated what had been his first feelings on meeting Laura Fičev, he usually got no further than 'homesickness'. He was not the man to analyze his feelings, nor was homesickness a particularly clearly defined concept for him (certainly not in connection with people), and yet it appeared to be the only word that could to some degree give expression to the strange emotion that possessed him ever since that first instant and had never left him again, whether she was present or not." A Song of Truth and Semblance. On the chessboard of their friendship a decisive move had been made, and as neither had made it deliberately, they were not yet sure what it meant. It would of course be simplest to say that something had changed in the power relationship between the two men, that the one showed himself to be weaker than the other had imagined him to be, but that would have to mean that whoever was now the stronger had always been the stronger though without knowing it." A Song of Truth and Semblance.