Self-Portrait of an Other

Cees Nooteboom, best known for his novel The Following Story, is one of the most distinguished and significant authors living in the Netherlands today. Self-Portrait of an Other is one of the most unique and innovative works in his oeuvre. Written in response to and published together with a series of drawings by the Berlin-based artist Max Neumann, the book draws on Nooteboom’s personal reflections—his arsenal of memories, dreams, fantasies, landscapes, stories and nightmares—and presents a set of prose poems that complements and echoes Neumann’s work. Full of striking scenes and disturbing images, the poems, driven by the logic of dreams, create the self-portrait of the title.

Available now for the first time in English, Self-Portrait of an Other brings together both the images and the text inspired by them, creating an unusual and creative poetic collection.

Listen to a radio interview in which Nooteboom discusses the book

‘Like the figures that feature in Neumann’s startling images and which emerge from a blood-soaked background, Nooteboom’s prose poems emerge from and speak to Neumann’s own. A series of dreamscapes and ruminations, of splintered moments in time and fetishized compulsions, Nooteboom’s words weave in and out of different states as seamlessly as do Neumann’s paintings.’ —Music and Literature