Self-Portrait of an Other: Dreams of the Island

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.