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. Praise for Nooteboom“[Nooteboom’s] books seem metaphors for art itself.”—Ed Park, Village Voice

Self-Portrait of an Other: Dreams of the Island and the Old City

Neumann, Max

NOOTEBOOM, CEES.

Arts & Photography

Seagull Books

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.

For nearly half a century, German artist Max Neumann has worked to create, hone, and elaborate a visual vocabulary that is dark, compulsive, and forceful. A lifelong collaborator, Neumann’s paintings have accompanied the work of Cees Nooteboom, Seamus Heaney, Fernando Pessoa, and László Krasznahorkai, among many others.   In Poetry and Time, Neumann’s haunting images are accompanied by a lyrical and penetrating text from poet Joachim Sartorius, who notes that a certain silence is at the very heart of poems, stating: “They know what it is they do, but do not say it.” Exploring this mystery, he considers examples from Dickinson, Rilke, and Shakespeare, among others, and examines the realities of transience and mortality at the center of poems’ reasons for being, their urge to form their own reality and abolish time while being inextricably bound to time. Sartorius’s ruminations beautifully complement Neumann’s series of thirty poignant paintings, making this volume is an extraordinarily rare and exquisite book.  

Poetry and Time (The German List)

Literature & Fiction

Sartorius, Joachim

Essays & Correspondence

This cahier is the result of a collaboration undertaken specially for The Cahiers Series, between Hungarian novelist László Krasznahorkai and German painter Max Neumann. Krasznahorkai, author of The Melancholy of Resistance and War &amp; War, responds with 14 texts to 14 depictions of a strange and ill-formed creature made by the renowned German painter Max Neumann. The texts speak from within the head of Neumann’s creature that seems to be menacing existence itself. The cahier is introduced with a preface by Irish novelist Colm Tóibín.

Animalinside (Volume 14) (Cahiers)

Krasznahorkai, László

World Literature

Sylph Editions

Some Heads (The German List)

Amelunxen, Hubertus Von

History & Criticism

Max Neumann: Malerei und Druckgraphik 1986 bis 1993 (German Edition)

Reference

Foreign Language Study & Reference

Richter

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