A Sense for Paradoxes

By : Annette Bach

There are no ships on the sea. Only great waves and cold winds. Miss Frida is freezing.

This is how Mats Leten starts his new book about the freezing Miss Frida. It is a poetical and very down-to-earth introduction to Frida’s story, which has not so much to do with the weather, but is really about absence and love and about Karl Johan, who is a sailor. It is only when he comes home from Africa that Frida thaws out, but until then we follow all her efforts to warm herself up.
   It is a delightful little story, especially because a long time actually elapses before the introductory words are linked up to an explanation, and so the child will both have to read on in the book and also understand by looking back. As the subject is very concrete and the story told humorously in a simple text with splendid, highly expressionistic illustrations, the structure story shows respect for and confidence in the child’s ability to perceive and interpret.
   Mats Leten has previously produced the picture books for very small children about Kaj, illustrated with are delicate watercolours. Last spring saw the publication of En underlig mand (A Strange Man) accompanied by intensely expressionistic illustrations, to which Miss Frida is a continuation. En underlig mand is about a man who finds himself in a country where all the inhabitants have green heads and do everything backwards. It is difficult to learn to live in such a strange place, where you can easily come to feel lonely, and the man goes off and finds people of his own kind and settles down among them, people who like him have white heads and act forwards. One day he sees a helpless little man in the street having difficulty in ordering a sausage backwards. He offers his help and ends amicably eating sausages together with the green man. An obvious moral didactically carrying a message about humanity and the fear of strangers who are different.
   En mærkelig mand was chosen as the winner of a children’s book competition organised by the Ministry of the Interior in connection with the European Year against Racism 1997. The official reason for awarding the prize to Leten was said to be that: “The judges find that (...)with its playful tone and its sense of paradox, the story will be able to speak to both children and adults, and that its contents will make it likely to be one of those children’s books that are read time and time again.”

Translated by Malene S. Madsen