Toon Tellegen
Letters to Anyone and Everyone (Brieven aan niemand anders)
Tellegen’s bizarre, moving and unfailingly poetic mental constructions generated a body of enthusiastic readers of all ages and won all major prizes for children’s literature. According to the index in Toon Tellegen’s collected animal stories Misschien wisten zij alles (Perhaps They Knew Everything), there are 169 animals living in the Tellegen’s story-book woods. His favourites appear to be the hedgehog, the frog, the cricket, and the beetle. The squirrel, the ant, and the elephant crop up so frequently that it would be impossible to list all the page numbers.
In fact, the letter and the cake also deserve an entry in the index, because their role is much more essential than that of the gnu or the sandfly, who actually could have been replaced by any other animal. The cake and the letter, on the other hand, are irreplaceable in Tellegen’s woods as symbols, almost as personifications: the one of festive get-togethers of any group, the other of awkward, often futile attempts to make contact.
Luckily, the letter has seen justice done in a new collection of animal stories, with beautiful and poignant illustrations by Mance Post and the unmistakably Tellegenesque title Brieven aan niemand anders (Letters to Anyone and Everyone). The letter makes an appearance in every story, either in a leading role, or simply because the woods’ inhabitants are used to seeing written signs of life being borne along by the wind from sender to addressee.
The human outlines of the letter become visible already on the second page, when the squirrel dresses his epistle to the ant in a jacket and tie before sending it off into the snow on its way to its destination. There are letters in all shapes and sizes. The penguin writes on ice floes that have melted by the time they arrive, and the toad’s furious letter swells up, starts to glow, flies up into the air like a ball of fire and falls, sizzling, into the river.
In these woods where the post flies around in such abundance, a letterless existence is synonymous with supreme sorrow, to be fought against with all one’s strength and creativity. Happily, the author has bestowed both of these qualities on his animals.
Publisher
Querido
Singel 262
NL - 1016 AC Amsterdam
TEL. +31 20 551 12 62
FAX +31 20 639 19 68
E-mail: [email protected]
Website: www.querido.nl
Publishing details
Brieven aan niemand anders (1996, 86 pp)
Illustrated by Mance Post
photo Mickey van Uden
Biography
Toon Tellegen (b. 1941), a GP by profession, became famous primarily for his poetic, philosophical animal stories about Squirrel, Ant, Mole, Hedgehog and the other animals, who are carefully trying to find their way in an incomprehensible world. However, his extensive oeuvre also includes fairytales, children’s books and poetry and prose for adults. Tellegen began his writing career as a poet. In 1984 he published Er ging geen dag voorbij (Not a Day Went By), his first collection of animal stories for children. Four more collections were to follow and all these stories were then collected in Misschien wisten zij alles (Perhaps They Knew Everything, 1995). Two of Tellegen’s books feature the elephant as the main character: in Jannes (1993), an elephant leads the protected life of a young child in a world in which every being wears a trunk. In Teunis (1996), on the other hand, the main character is the only elephant in a world of human beings, which results in the humorous description of the struggle of someone who is ‘different’. Besides his animal stories, Tellegen also created Juffrouw Kachel (Miss Stove, 1991), the terror of all schoolchildren, and Mijn vader (My Father, 1994), a loving portrait of the world’s most amazing father. It is no surprise that he has won both the Theo Thijssen Prize (an oeuvre award for writers of books for children and young adults) and the Constantijn Huygens Prize for his entire oeuvre
Dossier
Quotes
Toon Tellegen is the great liberator of words. He gives words a chance to unfold their wings, they put on a warm coat and go off to see the world. The result is a surrealistic tendency in Tellegen’s books, normal laws no longer apply, everything becomes new strange, funny, amazing.
Marjoleine de Vos, NRC Handelsblad
Toon Tellegen is an inventive and stylistically sensitive writer, with a very individual tone and beautiful use of language.
Hanneke de Klerck, de Volkskrant
The author is a past master at simply and beautifully describing thoughts that are frivolous and profound in turn.
Irene Verhiel, De Limburger
Translations
- Cartas de la ardilla, de la hormiga, del elefante, del oso.... Barcelona: Destino, 2001
- Cartes de l'esquirol, de la formiga, de l'elefant, de l'os.... Barcelona: Destino, 2001
- [(Brieven aan niemand anders)]. Seoul: BIR, 2004
- Continued...