Hanne Kvist (born 1969) is both an author and an illustrator. Since the
publication of her first work – the picture-book Alle tiders rejse
(The Journey of All-Time) – in 1995, she has produced several books, all of which,
while encompassing a variety of genres and stylistic experiments, tend nonetheless
to centre on two main themes: 1) the lot of children in modern society, and 2) love as a human force.
Kvist’s first two picture-books, Alle tiders
rejse and Der er krummer i bager
Svendsen (Svendsen the Baker Takes the Cake) (1996) were produced in
collaboration with Ida Toldbod. The
first is the ingeniously worded tale of two children, Oscar and Alvida, and
their plan to find time for their busy parents. The book depicts a fantastical
journey on which, in their
endeavour to understand the nature of time, the two children visit Madam
Patience, Mr. Hasty, Mr. Nightgood and the Calendar Lady. Although Kvist’s soft, quietly effervescent
watercolours enter into an excellent dialogue with the text, from a graphics
point of view they do seem very cramped on the densely printed, and somewhat
ponderous looking pages. This imbalance
is, however, resolved most effectively in Der
er krummer i bager Svendsen, where Kvist’s intricate illustrations are
given full scope to unfold in all their lively inventiveness and compositional
diversity, weaving and twining their way across each page. In keeping with its subject-matter, the story of Svendsen the baker and
his unshakeable faith in bread and cakes shaped like cars, airplanes and
slippers forms a beautifully attuned, lyrical and colouristic tribute to the
non-conformist approach to life and a love which does, in the end, win
through.
Kvist’s preoccupation with the interplay between the dark and the light forces in life,
manifests itself in Fanden’s fødselsdag
(The Devil’s Birthday) (2000), which she both wrote and illustrated. On his birthday, little
Devil has every one of his 717 birthday wishes granted – all, that is, except his most burning
desire: some friends to celebrate his birthday with him. In hell no one has friends,
only enemies, so this is one wish that his parents refuse to grant. The devil cries so
hard ”he almost put out the flames on his
quilt”. Then who should appear, but a
little fair-haired, soapy-smelling angel. Thus Kvist establishes a springboard
for the imaginative games with fire
and water with which the two children entertain one another until God calls to
tell the little angel-girl it’s time to come home. This is a lively, witty story,
in which the illustrations of the
underworld interiors are endowed with subtle, multilayered chromatic structures,
and the gaily burning rugs and other devilish props create a splendid, comic
background for a story which neatly and ingeniously challenges our standard
notions of heaven and hell.
That Hanne Kvist is a fully-fledged writer is evident from her award-winning
children’s book Drengen med sølvhjelmen
(The Boy With The Silver Helmet) (1999), the story of a young boy, Jon, and his
attempt – aided by a fascinating secondary character: the chauffeur Michum – to
find his little sister Liv, born with two tiny black wings sprouting from her
back, whom his parents have sold. Here,
fantasy and realism are effortlessly combined in a book which takes the road
movie as its model for an intriguing and unusually slanted little study of how
the need to mean something to someone can give rise to a new and transcendent
sense of self-esteem. Zentropa (a Danish film company) has bought the film rights to this highly original
novel which, with humour and literary nerve, paints a vivid portrait of a
lonely child’s struggle to come to terms with a world in which inhumanity and
”aloneness” seem to be the existential order of the day.
This theme is pursued in Kvist’s most recent
children’s novel Hund i himlen (Hound
in Heaven) (2001), in which both plot and narrative style cut right to the
quick. This is the stark, moving and unsentimental
story of Lora, a child of the streets who is sent to a children’s home. With
her she brings Hound, the one creature she cannot live without, but animals are
not allowed at the home and so her canine friend is taken from her, and with it
go the little girl’s last shreds of faith in mankind. She does not even know
whether Hound has been put down. With simple, distilled sensitivity, Kvist
describes Lora’s struggle to escape from her existential ground-zero, and reach
her own cathartic start afresh in
which, helped by the boy Nick - and with a new dog – she can get on with her
life, and with that God of whom one can never be quite sure. The writing is
compact, crisp, with terse,
pregnant sentences in which colours, sounds and simple sensations elevate the
story to the rareified sphere of the South-American mountains in which the book
is set.
Hanne Kvist seems, therefore – quite remarkably – to have the potential and the scope
to develop both of the careers, as author and as illustrator, which have in
only a very few years earned her a key place in the world of children’s books.
(2001)
