‘Don’t Tell Anyone’: K. Schippers’s Reflections as Novelist on Life-Writing and Transnationality

Abstract

This chapter focuses on the essayistic work of Dutch literary writer K. Schippers. In his book Niet verder vertellen [Don’t tell anyone] (2015), Schippers travels to Italy (Turin and Stampa) to follow in the footsteps of Italian painters De Chirico and Giacometti. In this novel, his reflections on the lives and works of other artists have implications for the reflection on his own life narrative. Biography and autobiography are confronted in this transnational piece of life writing. In some parts of the book, Schippers takes up the role of the Romantic traveller-biographer, travelling through time and space, following traces and constructing images of his mother, as well as of Breitner and Giacometti. In other parts of the book, though, Schippers makes use of fictional and imaginative techniques to bring the past back to life.