Cees Nooteboom, the travel writer who fell in love with Menorca, dies at 92

BarcelonaIt has been more than fifty years since the Dutch writer Cees Nooteboom (1933-2026) found peace and creative inspiration on the island of Menorca. "It's the place where I've written a good part of my books and poems," he acknowledged six years ago, when he received the Formentor Prize for his prolific and highly regarded work, from his home in Amsterdam. At that time, Nooteboom, who had just turned 87, couldn't travel to the neighboring island to collect the award due to health reasons, but he still had the strength to recall the origins of an obsession with writing that materialized in over fifty books that made him one of the most important figures in the field. In his bibliography, there are at least three titles available in Catalan. The following story (2004), Paradise lost (2006) and Detour to Santiago (2010), all three published by Bromera.

"When do you become a writer? Is it thanks to reading or to life?" Nooteboom asked himself in a volume of interviews he had given throughout his career. He then recalled how the Second World War had marked his generation—which also included authors like Gerard Reve, Albert Cornelis, and Tonke Dragt—and affected him personally. "My parents divorced in the last year of the war," he remembered. "Because of the famine in The Hague, my father, who died in a British bombing raid in 1944, had sent my mother and me out of the city, because there was still food there. Our home in The Hague; the image of that unrecognizable mountain of stones is etched in my memory." This could be one of the origins of Nooteboom's writing, which branches out into literary genres such as the novel, the essay, the chronicle, autobiographical prose, and poetry. It might also have begun to grow when he was delivering money "to elderly ladies of high society" while working at a bank—from ages 17 to 19: "I would make a detour to go through a wood where I would stop by a stream to think, and sometimes it seems to me that my writing began there, without writing a single word; from absenteeism and clandestinity which I now know are part of writing."

An author who loves cacti

One of Nooteboom's great passions throughout his life was travel, which motivated and nourished a good part of his books. Thus, The Buddha behind the stockade (1986, in Spanish by Siruela) stemmed from a stay in Thailand, Paradise lost (2006) was set in São Paulo, Nomadic Hotel (2002, in Spanish published by Siruela) included stays in countries such as Gambia, Mali, Sahara, Bolivia and Mexico and Detour to Santiago (2010) was structured around the numerous journeys he made over the years, starting from Menorca, to various parts of Spain. "Cees has maintained a nomadic and traveler's attitude throughout his life," commented Isabel-Clara Lorda Vidal, who has translated some twenty of Cees Nooteboom's titles into Spanish, on the occasion of his receiving the Formentor Prize. "This attitude is almost spiritual, internal: he has turned inward. Sometimes, when we talk, he tells me that all his acquaintances have Facebook and Twitter, but that, for him, his best friends are currently the cacti in his garden."

Despite his prolific work, built on the conviction that "writing is, after all, delaying mortality," Nooteboom ended up dying at the age of 92 in Menorca, the island he loved so much.