In France, culture is simply more highly regarded, I heard here and there after the singer Stromae had answered a question about music and depression in a French news broadcast on Sunday by singing his new song (about depression) outright. Art in the news! Such a thing would never be possible with us, barbarian Batavians.
That was, however, not counting Tonko Dop. The reporter of news hour who visits the nominees for the Libris Literature Prize every year like a brave, book-laden pack mule, has been working on a special book journey since Tuesday. He visits six Dutch children’s book authors of international fame. The youngest is 83, the oldest 93. We don’t see them in a cultural corner on the edges of the night, but just in news hour.
Tuesday pushed on Cap with Imme Dros (85) and Harrie Geelen (83). Sitting on the couch in a house that had long outgrown the clearing phase, the spouses started speaking at exactly the same time on the first question. Is there a limit to your versatility, Dop wanted to know. Dros: “Well, you can drop dead. Then it’s over.”
Geelen, writer and draftsman, talked about illustrating his wife’s work. “You don’t make a book together. That is not true. She is making a book. Finished. Then I’m going to sign what she wrote. I’m drawing something that I think I’d like to have included. Because you shouldn’t take anything away by signing.” His wife leaves things open, he said. Dros, sideways: “I don’t like descriptions.”
In this way Dop allowed himself to be transported to the land of wonder over which these two authors hold sway. “I often write something down and then I think: what a beautiful first sentence. Why am I writing that sentence?” said Geelen. “And then, through that sentence, comes a story. As if someone else is saying in my head: do that sentence.” If you write for very small children, Dros explained, „with your material, with your language, you have to make everything as small as possible. You leave out everything superfluous, but you have to give it some content.” Beside her, her husband sighed: “Yes, wonderful.”
Pay to read
Yes, wonderful – this reportage series. Dros told how she had fought the reading of her children and grandchildren. “They didn’t read, so I paid them. My granddaughter got five euros a book. That went well. Why pay if a child wants to join a football club and not to read?”
Her husband remembered how his father told him stories in bed eighty years ago. “The second story was in Tori-tori. That was a non-existent language.” Geelen spoke a few lilting sentences of Tori-tori, ending with a loud “Toe”. This startled young Harry – it was also the sign that he had to go to sleep.
Wednesday told colleague Els Pelgrom (87) that she writes her books for the child she herself was. “Busy, awkward and dreamy – but that’s what they all say.” Tonko Dop insisted that she tell us about her new book, due out this spring. “There’s a head on a pillow and it’s alive. There is a gecko that talks to the head and that becomes a friend. But that is enough.”
When Dop asked her if she considered herself a writer or a children’s author, he was scolded. “I think that’s so Dutch: everything has to be categorized right away.” (Harrie Geelen had said on Tuesday that a child decides whether something is a children’s book: “By reading it.”)
In this way, the cultural pessimists are wrong. The French may have Stromae in their journal, but we have Tonko Dop, the man who in news hour create a space for the imagination. Well, every day. And forever.
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