Toon Tellegen & Marit Törnqvist
Pikkuhenki
Pikkuhenki, is a classic and unusual fairytale about two young heroes, Pikkuhenki and Iwan, who ‘long ago, in a land far from here’ set off into the world, where they are confronted with fear, sadness, doubt, light and darkness and, strengthened by their travels, turn safely homewards.
Iwan has lost his mother in an unknown country that is ruled by a tyrannical emperor. Pikkuhenki (Finnish for ‘a little spirit’) is a tiny invisible witch whose minuscule size makes her doubt her status as a witch. Her invisibility means that Pikkuhenki can fly into people’s thoughts via their nose or ear and can influence them. Floating around in the heads and thoughts of people and animals, she haphazardly tries out her powers. When Pikkuhenki meets Iwan one day and flies around amongst his sad thoughts ‘about being smacked and going to bed without dinner, and about dying and never going back home and about freezing’, she changes Iwan into a hero, who frees the land from the cold-blooded emperor and finds his mother again.
One of Tellegen’s original ideas is Pikkuhenki’s invisibility. This means that readers have the freedom to complete the story by using their own imagination – and so do listeners, because Pikkuhenki is not only a fairytale told in words and pictures in a book, but also has a marvellous musical accompaniment on cd (composed by Klaas ten Holt).
Törnqvist and Ten Holt complete Tellegen’s story. Törnqvist’s strong illustrations, with their sense of colour, reflect Tellegen’s text, sometimes in a very detailed way. The people who Pikkuhenki saw ‘dancing and kissing and shutting each other away for a hundred years in castles covered with roses’ are all there, for example, depicted subtly and with a nod towards Grimm’s fairytales, just as Tellegen does with his words.
Tellegen’s story and voice, Törnqvist’s atmospheric illustrations and Ten Holt’s spectacular composition for wind instruments, percussion, violin and double bass reinforce each other wonderfully and demonstrate how successfully text, picture and music can be integrated.
Mirjam Noorduijn
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
Pikkuhenki (2005, 30 pp)
Illustrations: Marit Törnqvist
Age: 6+
Biographies
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
Marit Törnqvist, born in Sweden in 1964, studied illustration at the Gerrit Rietveld Academie in Amsterdam. Törnqvist, who designed the three-dimensional journey through Astrid Lindgren’s work at the Junibacken children’s cultural centre in Stockholm, illustrates other people’s work and also creates her own books. Her Klein verhaal over liefde won a Silver Slate Pencil (Zilveren Griffel), one of the major Dutch awards. Törnqvist’s work is always most impressive, but in Pikkuhenki she surpasses herself.
Dossier
Quotes
Astounding illustrations, each of which makes you think that Marit Törnqvist must possess supernatural powers.
Provinciale Zeeuwse Courant
Toon Tellegen, the writerphilosopher, at his best.
Vrij Nederland
A modern fairytale that embraces traditional fairytales with one sweeping gesture.
Vrij Nederland
Translations
- Pikkuhenki. Stockholm: Rabén & Sjögren, 2006
- [Chiisanachiisana Majopitsuki]. Tokyo: Tokuma Shoten, 2006
- Pikko, die Hexe. Düsseldorf: Sauerländer, 2006
- Continued...