The Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom, who has died aged 92, looked and wrote in his later years like an epitome of the suave and cosmopolitan man of letters. A devoted European, he lived in an elegant 1731 merchant’s house in Amsterdam, but spent every summer on the island of Menorca. Nooteboom published almost 60 books: fiction, poetry and travel writing. Stylish, erudite and reflective, they brought him a shelf of major awards including, in 2009, a career-crowning lifetime honour for Dutch-language writers: the Prijs der Nederlandse Letteren.
Yet he remained, as he put it in his 2016 work 533: A Book of Days, “a child of the war, and after that the cold war”. In 1940, he had watched from his family’s apartment in The Hague as nearby Rotterdam burned in air raids. In early 1945, misdirected RAF bombs killed his father during the “hunger winter” in which more than 20,000 people died of starvation in the Netherlands. Nooteboom built his urbanity, and seeming serenity, amid ruin and trauma. “I have not remembered chaos,” he said. “I found my way out of all that in my books.”
