{"id":1881,"date":"2025-05-08T14:31:39","date_gmt":"2025-05-08T12:31:39","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/ambassade-hotel-nl.ont.stuurlui.dev\/?post_type=blog&p=1881"},"modified":"2025-05-08T14:31:39","modified_gmt":"2025-05-08T12:31:39","slug":"tom-lanoye","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/ambassade-hotel-nl.ont.stuurlui.dev\/de\/blog\/tom-lanoye\/","title":{"rendered":"Tom Lanoye"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
\n
\n
\n
\n

<\/h1>\n

Tom Lanoye<\/h1>\n

\nTom Lanoye (b.1958) is known as a novelist, theatre author, poet, scriptwriter and performer. His publications include bestsellers such as Cardboard Boxes, At War and Fortunate Slaves. In 2012, he wrote the Book Week Gift Clear Sky. In 2014, he was awarded the Constantijn Huygens Prize for his oeuvre.<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"\"<\/p>\n

Pied-\u00e0-Terre<\/h3>\n

\nHow many Belgians would dream of a pied-\u00e0-terre in Amsterdam? To be honest: very few. Most Belgians dream of Paris, they swear by Berlin, they laud London for its shops and Barcelona for its Ramblas. The snobs generally get moist for Venice. And what Belgian wasn\u2019t born to be a snob and stay a snob \u2014 beneath a layer of politeness known as slyness?<\/p>\n

Take me, for instance. I laugh at all the Belgians I note above, and I amaze them by stating that there is no better place in Europe than Amsterdam to eat and wander and squander, and visit museums and party and visit theatre and sleep. Certainly in Corona times, because all the other tourists have finally kept away in droves, so all those ridiculous cheese ball and Nutella chocolate paste shops will hopefully go bankrupt. I\u2019ve never said that Amsterdam is perfect.<\/p>\n

From another perspective, my mother-in-law was born here, my publisher is housed in the finest building on the Herengracht, and my Amsterdam pied-\u00e0-terre is also on that splendid canal. I feel at home there without having to rob a couple of banks first. Because the house prices will never improve again, not anywhere above the Moerdijk down south. I\u2019ve never said that the whole of the Netherlands is perfect. What I have said lately \u2014 watching the non-forming government in The Hague \u2014 is that the Netherlands is transforming into Belgium at a rapid speed. So, as a Belgian, you should certainly make tracks for Amsterdam as fast as possible, before it\u2019s transformed into Antwerp or Brussels. Believe me, they are both even further from perfect.<\/p>\n

If they do travel to Amsterdam, these curious Belgians, then I hope they\u2019ll pass by my pied-\u00e0-terre. For years, I\u2019ve felt so at home in the Hotel Ambassade that I sometimes want to call the police to have the other guests expelled for violation of domestic privacy. The phrase sounds even better in Flemish: Woonstschennis, or home invasion.<\/p>\n

You never used to see Dutch authors in the Hotel Ambassade. Perhaps that\u2019s where the name comes from. You had to be a foreigner to be let in. Then, Arnon Grunberg started writing. And so, travelling too. People used to travel to learn; since Grunberg, you travel to write. He\u2019s not always perfect either, but he does have taste. Otherwise, he\u2019d have chosen another hotel as a pied-\u00e0-terre in the city of his birth. At the moment, he\u2019s here more than I am.<\/p>\n

Sometimes, I see him at breakfast and then we wave at each other. I\u2019ll admit, that\u2019s the advantage of a hotel versus a real pied-\u00e0-terre. In a real pied-\u00e0-terre, you seldom find yourself waving at Arnon Grunberg over breakfast. I have, in the past, waved at Sandro Veronesi and Donna Tartt, but they didn\u2019t wave back. That\u2019s how it is with foreigners. They look away from other foreigners.<\/p>\n

A real pied-\u00e0-terre should have a family. With the Ambassade, this is a sort of African extended family. I truly don\u2019t know any other hotel in the world \u2014 yes, I confess: I do sometimes travel to other cities \u2014 where I\u2019m greeted so warmly by people who know my name and whose names I know too. During my first post-Corona stay, this was one of the highlights, no irony. The Slavery exhibition in the Rijksmuseum and the guided tour of the Hermitage were great, of course, but I equally enjoyed having a nice chat with Claudia and Wim and Eelco and Tamara e tutti quanti. With us complaining that we\u2019d had to miss each other for two years. And counting on our fingers how many years it must have been since me and my guy first spent the night here.<\/p>\n

That was on the occasion of a Book Ball during a Book Week, when they were spotlighting Flemish letters. So, a very long time ago. Hugo Claus and Harry Mulisch were still alive. They were standing next to each other in the beautiful lobby of the Stadsschouwburg Theatre, like a regal couple who were offering audiences and hands to kiss to the plebs. We, the plebs, preferred to go off and dance and drink on the stage in the theatre auditorium.<\/p>\n

That night, my man couldn\u2019t find one of his contact lenses in the bathroom of our future pied-\u00e0-terre. Although he\u2019d only just taken them out, both of them. In my recollection, we crawled around on our knees for an hour, searching and swearing, until we finally turned in.<\/p>\n

We did find the lens again, just before breakfast. In a crack between the washbasin and the wall. You won\u2019t hear me say that my pied-\u00e0-terre is perfect. For a writers\u2019 hotel, there are an awful lot of paintings around. But the library is even bigger. And, apart from one crack, I\u2019ve had few other complaints in all these years.<\/p>\n

View the column on\u00a0the website of \u2018Het Parool\u2019.<\/a><\/p>\n

What is a writers\u2019 hotel without writers? A pen without ink? For a period of six months in 2021, one author a week was invited to stay at the Ambassade Hotel and describe their writing lives at that time. Throughout the period May to November 2021, the newspaper Het Parool published the Writers\u2019 Hotel columns in its weekly Arts Section.<\/p>\n

Read more about\u00a0this column project\u00a0in collaboration with \u2018Het Parool\u2019.<\/p>\n

Would you like to stay at the writers\u2019 hotel as well? Enjoy a unique experience in the Ambassade Hotel\u00a0with these special offer packages\u00a0or come and admire the library after visiting our sunny\u00a0terrace on the Herengracht!<\/p>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>\n <\/div>","protected":false},"featured_media":0,"template":"","meta":{"_acf_changed":true},"blog_category":[],"class_list":["post-1881","blog","type-blog","status-publish","hentry"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/ambassade-hotel-nl.ont.stuurlui.dev\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog\/1881","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/ambassade-hotel-nl.ont.stuurlui.dev\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/ambassade-hotel-nl.ont.stuurlui.dev\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/blog"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/ambassade-hotel-nl.ont.stuurlui.dev\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1881"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"blog_category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/ambassade-hotel-nl.ont.stuurlui.dev\/de\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/blog_category?post=1881"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}