In the years to come, when time has softened memories, some may say that Cees Nooteboom lacked only a Nobel Prize. As if that would have crowned an extraordinary literary career fueled by an insatiable curiosity, which, in retrospect, became his own poetics – producing novels, essays, art books and poetry for more than 70 years. In the club of great “overlooked” writers by the Nobel, the Dutch author joins Virginia Woolf, Philip Roth, Italo Calvino and Jorge Luis Borges, among others.
A major figure in Dutch-language and European letters of the second half of the 20th century and the dawn of the 21st, he belonged to that group of writers whom literary memory and his many admirers honored far more than any prize could. Never mind the fanfare that accompanies Sweden’s highest literary honor – Nooteboom, who died Wednesday, February 11, at the age of 92, walked his own path from book to book, following in the footsteps of the pilgrim, the traveler and the seeker.
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