Jeroen Brouwers' Paper Monument

“I should like to make of all my writings, even my failures, of which I'm ashamed, a paper monument, which can, somewhere, still be visited in a landscape where it is forever autumn and everything is draped in cobwebs, long after I am dead and buried. It must be possible to say of that monument: this is the life of Jeroen Brouwers. People will comment that it was full of crinkles and tears when it was put up, but that sentence about that compote and the flies and the rotting fruit isn't bad at all.” Here is a real writer. (With an extract from the novel Dateless Days).