Cees Nooteboom

Dutch writer of novels, travel literature, poetry and journalist.

Noorteboom's father Hubertus Maria Nooteboom (13 February 1897, Den Haag, 17 March, Voorburg) was a merchant. He married the much younger Johanna Carolina Christina Sophia Pessers (29 December 1910, Tilburg - 7 January 2008, Loon op Zand). The family moved a lot. In the seven years before the war broke out he lived on seven addresses in Den Haag and Rijswijk. With his father, he watched the bombardment of airport Ypenburg by the Germans on 10 May 1940. On 5 Augustus 1943 his father left the family, on 28 March 1944 he divorced and on 3 March 1945 he got severely wounded during the Bombing of the Bezuidenhout. The targets of the the allied forces were V2-launching sites, but the 67 tonnes of brisant bombs fell on on a not yet evacuated part of Den Haag. As fire engines and firemen had been sent to Germany, the resulting fire was unchecked, killing 511 people.

After the war there followed again a lot of moves of house. For details see the DBNL. In 1948 his mother remarried a very strict Catholic. Nooteboom was sent to of Franciscan and Augustinian monastery schools. He was bright enough for the Gymnasium, but he attended four of them, without attaching to really one of them and without getting ever the desired diploma. In 1951 he left home after an argument with his stepfather. He got a job as bank clerk in Hilversum , but still studied in the evening for the Lyceum diploma.

In 1953, after being rejected for the Dutch military service as too meagre (1952), Nooteboom started to travel abroad, typically by hitch-hiking in Scandinavia and France, as he had little money. He met his travelling friend, the half Jewish Dutch photographer Philip Mechanicus (13 Augustus 1936, A'dam - 30 July 2005, A'dam) in Paris. In 1954 he started writing his début novel "Philip en de anderen" (Philip and the others) that appeared in 1955.