Reading and writing

In recent months I've been acquainting myself with a few Dutch authors (in translation of course). Trying to get a feel for this culture by reading some of its literary output. A few months ago I read Cees Nooteboom's "In the Dutch Mountains" - a multi layered but short novel which had good sections but others where I found I was wanting to skip across paragraphs- never a good sign. More recently I asked a shop assistant to recommend a good Dutch author and went home with W.F. Hermans' "Beyond Sleep": a tale of a Dutch Geology PhD student pushing himself to the utmost to complete some implausible research above the artic circle (hence the title). It is considered an iconic book and was well written, but didn't push my buttons, although he really did a good job of catching the discomfort - physical and psychological - of a young Dutchman confronting the wilderness of the tundra. (My favourite novel based around being a PhD student is Patricia Dunker's "Hallucinating Foucault". It's become a cult gay book -but it's focus on reading and passion have a universal appeal). The most recent Dutch novel was "In Babylon" - not so much a Dutch novel as a Jewish one - but one largely set in the Netherlands and written by a Dutchman. Based on series of flashbacks and dreams it follows the trials, triumphs and tragedies of a Jewish family tracing the family tree back to wandering clock repairers in C17th Eastern Europe through to their ancestors who worked on Project Manhattan and become men of letters and new-age gurus in the late C20th. A hugely ambitious book, with large elements of magical realism, it only occasionally falls short of its ambitions and held me entranced thoughout most of it. The best of the batch so far. Does anyone have any more recomendations?