”When one’s a poet, one has to tax one’s
mind all the time for good ideas, otherwise one’ll never be rich and famous,
and that’s what I want to be. A rich and famous poet. Then I’d say ”Here’s the
rent on time, dear Mrs Fian, and kindly let me have two or three thousand
vanilla biscuits while we’re at it”, and when I was driving through Vanløse in
my flash Cadillac, people would turn their heads in the street and say ”Hey,
isn’t that the famous poet driving there? He’s great”.
These words belong to
the poor poet in Kim Fupz Aakeson’s Poeten fra Vanløse (The Poet from
Vanløse, 1988). When questioned
about why he writes for children, young people and adults, Fupz has answered
with this very quote, which is, moreover, very typical of the way he writes.
Fupz was born with an
artistic silver spoon in his mouth in Copenhagen on 12th September
1958. He has not – as yet – recorded a CD, but otherwise he has tried the lot
from satirical drawings and picture books, poetry, short stories and novels for
children, young people and adults, to radio plays and films – and done it well!
He started with a
cartoon called Gå løs på livet (Attack
Life) in 1982, and this seems to be what he has done since. Some picture
books followed the cartoon. Fupz still writes picture book stories, but does
not illustrate them any longer. He has said, there was a time in the ’90s when
he felt weighed down by fatigue when he had to draw. He had used up all his
energy writing the text, so he handed over the work of illustration to other
illustrators – especially younger ones with lively imaginations and the same
drive and happy craziness he puts into his texts.
Fupz writes in a
special cheeky Copenhagen manner in a style that gushes with gusto without
being superficial. His style has an ease that usually ’cloaks’ the deeper
substance and meaning of the content. He writes humour on a basis of
seriousness and earnestness; perhaps going over the line to slapstick in a few
of his picture book texts, stories for reading aloud, and film manuscripts.
He has become a
household name due to the film-success Den
eneste ene (The Only One) for which he wrote the manuscript. And perhaps
also due to the manuscripts based on his own books for the children’s films
Hannibal og Jerry (Hannibal and Jerry) and
Miraklet (The Miracle).
Fupz writes
powerfully not least about different kinds of madness, and perceives the world
with a mischievous glint in his eye that enables the reader to see reality
just as distorted and
surrealistic as it appears. For example, an uncle, in the picture book Dengang
min onkel Kulle blev skør (The Day My Uncle Kulle Went Mad, 1990), sits on the
roof of a family’s tool shed as if it were the most natural
thing in the world, because he has become a rhododendron and wants to sit in
the sun and wait till he flowers. And he cannot do this in his small town flat.
Being on the roof, this uncle throws the whole of the small nearby community in
relief, and into confusion. The children consider it an amusing variation of
daily life, the adults lose their heads, and the uncle is definitely not
presented as the most crazy of them.
Fupz’ books are
positively limitless. Take, for example, the picture books: Mor
(Mum, 1998), Pigen der krøb (The Girl who shrunk, 1998), or Drengen der
lå i sin seng mens
hans far og damefrisøren så på (The Boy who lay in his Bed while his Father and
the Ladies’ Hairdresser looked on, 2001). The very title of the last book
is in itself ’unheard of’ but a typical choice of title for Fupz. The boy in
Mum runs away from home because he is
ashamed of his exceedingly fat and irresponsible mother. The Girl who shrunk
becomes smaller and smaller every time someone
says her name MariaMarianne. Finally, she is just about to be eaten by a cat
when, with a proper primal scream, she gets on an even keel. The third picture
book is about a boy who misses his dead mother so much that he is just about
ready to follow her to the grave. All three books describe children with
genuine existential problems – all three of them are in really deep water
before they find their own solutions to their problems. These books give the
adult reader a punch in the face, for how do adults of today treat children? Do
these books become moralising because of this? No, because Fupz employs irony,
and adds satire close to caricature that he mixes with humour and sweetness, so
that the books, regardless of the serious intent of the madness – or maybe
precisely because of it – hit home effectively both with children and adults.
