Anton Koolhaas (1912–1992)

Most stories and novels of Anton Koolhaas are about animals. Stories in which both animals and people appear are often written from the perspective of the animals.

Een schot in de lucht is a short novel or novella in five chapters. The central character in the story is the hound Dian. The main event in the book is a deadly car crash, caused in an attempt to avoid running over another dog in the story, Moppie. However, since the perspective lies with the dogs, the car crash is of minor importance in the life of Dian.… (more)

This turns out to be a form I've never come across before: a picaresque novella! A series of otherwise unrelated scenes are linked by the presence of a randomly-wandering dog, as it abandons the country-house where it is well looked after but not loved, visits a farm, wanders into town, witnesses a road accident, spends some time hanging about a station, and ends up with a depressed and lonely railwayman in his signal-box.

We catch glimpses of complex human and animal stories as the dog passes by, but the dog has always moved on before we get a chance to examine them in detail and see how they are going to end. Both from the animal and the human points of view, the view of life is a fairly bleak one, and definitely meant for adult readers: more Richard Adams than Beatrix Potter, but always with an ironic twist. The animals behave in naturalistic ways, but they have a kind of anthropomorphised consciousness that the narrator can see into. Not the sort of thing I often read, but interesting, and quite nicely done.

Fun, too, to be back in the world of 1962, with lever-frame signal boxes in the middle of nowhere with telegraph bells and buzzers, coal trains, and a station buffet with revolving doors...

In keeping with the picaresque plot, the committee commissioned no fewer than five artists to illustrate a chapter each with line-drawings. Lots of variety in style, as you would expect, and also in form: four of the drawings are double-page spreads, others are little sketches of dogs, birds and flies that pepper the margins. Fun!… (more)

The Dutch writer Anton Koolhaas is most well-known for his novels and stories featuring animals as the main characters. However, he has written a few novels in which people form the main protagonists, featuring animals is a sub-plot.Vanwege een tere huid is one of these books.

One criterion to decide whether a book is "good", is whether it leaves an impression on the reader or not. That impression may be a sense of beauty, importance, insight, but also be a sense of disgust, a provocation or some very unsettling set of images and/or ideas. Vanwege een tere huid has certainly touched such a chord in me.

The main story is simple enough. First love, a twelve-year-old boy loves a girl, same age, but abandons her. Both are scarred for life.

The sub-plot is the story of two non-existing animals --hoedna's--, life-long mates, which can best be imagined as a kind of beaver.

The epilogue to the book is unexpectedly philosophical, and in two or three pages seems to cover more material than the essence of the story itself.

The story is best summed up by a quotation from the book: "In every woman a girl has died, in every man a boy."… (more)