Eric de Kuyper near Nijmegen in Kranenburg in Germany, about from the Dutch border, as does the main character of de Kuyper's short story "De verkeerde krant," ("The Wrong Newspaper"). De Kuyper has said that he feels at home both in Belgium and the Netherlands to a certain degree, as well as somewhat of a stranger in each of the countries. De Kuyper's first novel ("Aan zee: taferelen uit de kinderjaren"; "By the Sea: Scenes from a Childhood") consists of a series of insightful snapshots of a small boy's life in post-World War II Brussels and family summer vacation at Ostend.Together, they conjure
Eric de Kuyper up a nostalgic vignette of times gone by, along with a timeless sense of childhood when one feels everything revolves around him. A reviewer said of its effective acuteness that no one who has read it can look at the Belgian beach without thinking of de Kuyper. The lyrical "By the Sea" turned out to be the first volume in de Kuyper's successful series of 3rd-person fictionalized memoirs. In the short story ("De verkeerde krant"), de Kuyper turns his observations to all things German as a Dutch professor, living in Germany like de Kuyper, takes a train trip to Frankfurt: