Cees Nooteboom
Stranpoti do Santiaga
For this book the born traveller Nooteboom made a selection from the many articles he has written about Spain over the last decades. That was no simple task, he explained in an interview, because of the degree of his devotion to that country. Nooteboom has been visiting Spain for forty years. He spends several months each year on one of the Spanish islands and has written a significant part of his work there. This close bond and his unconditional love made it difficult for him to maintain the distance a travel writer needs. In Berlin when the Wall fell, Nooteboom succeeded where many German authors failed by keeping an overview and the distance necessary for concise, pithy observations (Berlijnse notities, 1990).
