Biography
I WAS BORN on All Souls Day. At just two weeks old I got whooping cough (picked up in the hospital). The doctor said: ‘That one’s going to die.’ But I didn’t want to die. My parents sat by my crib day and night, wiping the mucus out of my mouth with cotton buds. So I lived. The doctor said: ‘That baby’s made of concrete.’ And so I was. A block of concrete with exposed nerves and a dog’s heart, that’s how I’d describe myself.
I was brought up along with a dog, Pim. He was a sleek fox terrier of the His Master’s Voice kind. From the age of one I slept with him in a crate. Tenderness, vigilance and intelligence through and through. That’s why I’ll never rate myself above animals and why I fall out with everyone who wishes to do so. It’s also why my husband and I have always had fox terriers. The first was called Dar, the second Plume, the third Koert and the current one’s Pieter. Koert died on 22 August in Ostend. There’s no dog cemetery there, so we had to have him cremated at Boom near Antwerp. I was intending to scatter his ashes on the beach at Ostend (inspired by the final wish of world famous dancer Maurice Béjart) but on further reflection I couldn’t part with them and now the urn is on my bedside table in Ostend.
I didn’t like dolls; I cuddled cucumbers. When I was five I walked into a greengrocer’s shop with my father and saw a big green cucumber lying all alone in a box. Straight away I felt intensely sorry for it. So my father bought it for me. At home he cut out a pair of eyes and a smiling mouth. Its curved shape meant I could enjoy rocking it in my arms. At last, a doll without a child’s face, and a live one, too! But all that lives must die. When it started rotting and even a sticking plaster no longer helped, we buried it in the garden. Since then I’ve had hundreds of other cucumbers (and buried them).
Both my father and my dogs taught me that you must not submit to hierarchies established by others. At home we didn’t think any more highly of a great play by Shakespeare than of a comic strip by Hergé, of the Bible than of a bottle of wine, of an intellectual than of the organ grinder. Only one thing mattered: quality. And rightly too. That had a huge influence on my choice of friends and on my attitude to culture.
I value my mother above all for her exemplary love of animals. When we went to Artis or any other zoo we always took along bags filled with shellfish for the pelicans, kidneys for the hyenas, bread-and-honey for the bears, apples for the rhinoceroses, peanuts for the monkeys and endive for the hippos. She adopted a dog from the pound on several occasions as well. And she never minded the city pigeons flying into the nursery to spend the night on top of the toy cupboard.
My father was an art historian. He worked as a documentalist at the art-historical institute in Utrecht and compiled his own gigantic collection of thousands of pictures. He cut them out of art calendars and the Christmas issues of glossy magazines like L’Oeil and Du. Summum summarum, a cut-and-pasting father like that. From time to time he let me sit on his lap and got me to do an ‘exam’. I had to guess from which era a work of art originated and who had created it. I built up a vast expertise about painting. His collection is now in the Art-Historical Documentation Centre in The Hague.
You can’t lengthen your life but you can broaden it, so I now live with my husband and dog in three places at once: Ostend, France and Amsterdam. It requires a bit of organization and sometimes homesickness needs to be held at bay, but it suits us fine. Woods, sea and city bustle: you couldn’t hope for better sources of inspiration. I’ve built up a new treasure trove of expertise, too. I know how a lighthouse works, I can dismantle a tractor, I can identify at least ten kinds of edible mushrooms, and I speak good Flemish and French.
I’m often described as a lover of detail. As a rule that’s kindly intended, but it doesn’t reflect the facts. There are no details. Everything is connected by chains of causality and you don’t need to be a sleuth like me to discover that the hairs on a caterpillar are no less important than the Statue of Liberty.
And what is my contribution to the battle against terrorism? This: every writer or artist who takes himself seriously is ex-officio a terrorist.
The Author
Charlotte Mutsaers is the author of twelve books. For her literary work she has been awarded the Jan Greshoff Prize, the Busken Huet Prize, the Contantijn Huygens Prize and the PC Hooft Prize. For her literary and artistic work she received the Jacobus van Looy Prize. She has been nominated for the AKO Literature Prize, the Golden Owl and the Libris Literature Prize. In May 2010 she was awarded the PC Hooft Prize for her oeuvre as a whole.
Watch Charlotte Mutsaers talk about her novel Coachman Autumn for Dutch broadcaster VPRO.
See Charlotte Mutsaers’ workspace in the Dutch daily newspaper NRC Handelsblad.
