Toon Tellegen
My Father (Mijn vader)
The father of all fathers
Toon Tellegen’s animal stories were originally published under Querido’s children’s book fund, but have now been compiled for an adult audience. An unusual, but quite understandable development. Tellegen is a self-willed writer who is difficult to place into any of the accepted literary pigeonholes and now readers of all ages have discovered his remarkable animal forest. A delightful place for language lovers who are wont to entertain strange thoughts now and again. Here, the profound brooding of Tellegen’s poetry for adults finds an endearing, comical counterpart without losing its serious undertone.
The register of My Father, in which a small boy tells about his extraordinary father, is light. The book is beautifully designed and Rotraut Susanne Berner’s absurdist drawings make the relationships immediately evident. Father is a giant – but a visible and friendly one – an overgrown rascal in enormous trainers with strange glasses and an odd shock of hair. His son, Jozef, is a mini-person with a big head, who looks up to his father in every sense of the word.
Jozef draws a portrait of this awe-inspiring being, who knows everything and can do everything: catch thieves, become invisible, put out fires, hold back bulldozers and stop the war. Father whispers him the answers at school, knows better than the doctor and throws the horrible swimming teacher into his own horrible swimming pool.
The form is that of all Tellegen’s prose: a seemingly random number of short passages – without any apparent order or cohesion – in which the same characters continually appear. There is also a clear Von Münchhausen-style tendency towards tall stories. Just as, in the animal stories, the elephant flies and sits on the branch of a tree, and just as Miss Stove is the epitome of pedagogic pestilence, this is about the father of all fathers. It is precisely the way the age of unconditional belief and trust in paternal omnipotence is seen through childish eyes that ensures that this tall tale will be recognised by all readers as a true story, in essence.
Bregje Boonstra
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
Mijn vader (1994, 106 pp)
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
Quotes
What makes My Father special is the superior way that language and imagination, form and content come together. (…) Toon Tellegen is not only a linguistic virtuoso with a large percentage of quotable sentences, he (still) knows how children think and what they need.
De Volkskrant
In none of his previous books has Tellegen succeeded so brilliantly in combining his own thoughts on life with children’s drama and poetic language. He has once again enriched the canon of children’s literature.
Algemeen Dagblad
My Father is a moving, humorous, symbolic and surrealistic story, which takes as its point of departure children’s unwavering love and unshakable logic.
Vernieuwing
Translations
- Il mio papà. Milano: Feltrinelli, 2001
- Minu isa. Tallinn: Huma, 2002
- Mi padre. Madrid: Siruela, 1995
- Continued...