Paul Biegel
The Little Captain (De kleine kapitein)
De kleine kapitein (The Little Captain, 1970) is one of the most appealing children’s stories ever to have been written in Dutch. Rarely has the spirit of a nine-year-old (boy or girl, it doesn’t matter which) been understood so completely and been quite so irresistibly enchanted.
Just imagine it happened to you. You live in a village by the sea and, one day, waves as high as a tower block dump a ship onto the dunes. And from that ship, the Neverleak, crawls a boy who says that he’s the captain. Of course you’re going to help him repair the Neverleak, and wait with him for the huge wave to turn around and get his boat afloat once again.
And then, while all the other children are asleep, that special storm begins to rise. Tubby, Marinka and Timid Tony are the only ones awake and they go with the Little Captain. Far away from school and parents, they have the craziest adventures on the island of Great and Growing, and visit a fire-spitting mountain and a ghost town built on stilts. And Biegel wouldn’t be Biegel if there weren’t a thread running through the story to tie everything together.
However, this colourful, fairytale Odyssey for children was certainly not Biegel’s favourite book. Although it was probably his best-selling title and the one that children most appreciated, later in life he was sometimes rather grouchy about his most adventurous creations, perhaps because they were so much more light-hearted than his more profound masterworks.
He was wrong about this, however, because the masterly style of this book really is a match for his other titles. And De kleine kapitein is also infused with elements that typify Biegel’s work: the desire to go off on an adventure and yet, at the same time, being scared of the idea; the uncomplicated world of boyhood, contrasted with threats from the big outside world; and the fear of becoming an adult, which in his books is always just about, once again, averted.
By Pjotr van Lenteren
Publisher
Holland
Spaarne 110
NL-2011 CM Haarlem
TEL. +31 23 532 30 61
FAX +31 23 534 29 08
E-mail: info@uitgeverijholland
Website: www.uitgeverijholland.nl
Publishing details
De kleine kapitein (1970, 128 pp)
Illustrations: Carl Hollander
Age: 6+
Biography
Paul Biegel (1925-2006) dreamed of becoming a pianist, but finally, by way of a failed law degree and a period spent in the USA, ended up as a writer for a television guide and a cartoon studio. In 1962 he debuted as a children’s author with De gouden gitaar (The Golden Guitar). A new book followed almost every year.
In the nearly forty years Paul Biegel wrote for children, he enjoyed unabated success with both readers and critics. Oblivious to passing fashions and visibly enjoying playing with language, he related his timeless tales of dwarfs, princesses, witches, robbers and talking animals. His world was that of the fairytale, with a riddle to be solved, a scraggy hero and the eternal struggle between Good and Evil.
Some of Biegel’s stories are of the adventurous, unpretentious kind, such as De kleine kapitein (The Little Captain, 1971). De tuinen van Dorr (The Gardens of Dorr, 1969), Nachtverhaal (Night Story, 1992) and De soldatenmaker (The Soldier-Maker, 1994), on the other hand, are based on great themes such as friendship and love, loneliness, fear, jealousy, death and war. Biegel’s is a unique voice in Dutch children’s literature; a ‘master narrator with a robber’s heart’, as he has been called. The language in his books shimmers and sings and the adventures he devises are breathtaking, whether they are about a princess, a dwarf or a bunch of mice. Biegel’s work earned him many awards.
Website: www.paul-biegel.com
Quotes
The Little Captain helps every child some of the way through the sea of life en route to the island of ‘Great and Growing’. Fantastic.
Jeugdboekengids
The language fizzes and sparkles and is packed with jokes, rhymes and words that don’t yet exist.
De Groene Amsterdammer
Translations
- [Chiisana sencho no daiboken]. Tokyo: Akane Shobo, 1984
- El pequeño capitán. Barcelona; Madrid: Noguer, 1991
- Küçük kaptan. Istanbul: Yayinevi, 1986
- Continued...