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Anton Koolhaas

Twelve-year-old Jokke sees Takkie, a girl his age, sitting in her window every day. He dreams of her – when she’s standing in front of him one day, he is dumb-founded. What follows is an outing in a canoe that fills to the brim with shyness and misunderstandings and yet doesn’t tip over. Koolhaas’ prose is always lyrical, but never pretentious. He puts the two young people under an early spring sun – without heat, but full of promise.With the same loving detail, Koolhaas portrays the life of two hudnas – fictitious, beaver-like animals that live off the fish they ingeniously catch in a river delta further downstream. The two animals, Lussel and Twenna are their names, are very instinctive in everything they do, and all too human in their longing for warm Africa, where they were born. Koolhaas’ universe is characterised by gentle irony, great feeling and a sense of powerles-ness. There is no malice here, just regret and ineptitude. In the end, the storylines of the children and the animals converge, when Jokke ends up in the animals’ territory – with fatal consequences. Here, Koolhaas writes one of the most poignant lines in Dutch literature: ‘Very dead, if only just so.’ In Due to a Tender Skin, Koolhaas shows how a writer can use a seemingly small story to explore the major themes of human existence with remarkable subtlety.Publishing details Vanwege een tere huid (1973) 176 pages 33,000 words 200,000 copies soldPublisher Van Oorschot Mark Pieters <a href="mailto:Mark@vanoorschot.nl">Mark@vanoorschot.nl</a>Rights Stella Rieck <a href="mailto:Rieck@cossee.com">Rieck@cossee.com</a>Translated titles (selection) Dierenverhalen (Der dünne Pelz des Bären Burlót. Tiergeschichten): Germany (Luchterhand, 1996). De geluiden van de eerste dag (Die Stimmen des ersten Tages): Germany (Luchterhand, 1999).

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A writer with a bizarre imagination, highly versatile, with an irreverentirony and impressive restraint. Due to a Tender Skin is undoubtedly Koolhaas’ most accomplished book.

I discovered Koolhaas last year. I read Due to a Tender Skin, which turned out to be a forgotten masterpiece, a ten-out-of-ten.

Perhaps I’m basing this too much on the immediacy of the emotions in this book, but I believe this is Koolhaas’ best work yet. His most affecting work, too. And most terrible – because, as he writes in this book, one’s first love is a gift from the devil.

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A literary classic about love and the way we rebel against our own vulnerability

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Vanwege een tere huid

Few things are more affecting than a lonely twelve-year-old catching a girl’s eye and falling in love at first sight. Anton Koolhaas situates this story full of clumsiness and yearning for the future in a setting shaped by the past. The result is a confrontation the reader will never forget.

Due to a Tender Skin

Mr Tip is a pig who wonders why the time keeps coming around when the fattest pig is removed from the sty. When fellow pig Simon Artzt disappears one day, Mr Tip finds that he is the fattest.He decides to resist in whatever way he can when his turn comes, but in the event he trots briskly over to the slaughterhouse truck. Meanwhile life in the sty goes on as ever. There is already a new fattest pig.Koolhaas’ animal stories are part of a long tradition, but they are unlike anything else in the genre. These are not fairy tales or parables, since although rich in symbolism they often exhibit an acute despair and a cool determination that belong to modern realist literature. They show, not without humour, that both animals and humans often find themselves in borderline situations between the self and the community, between life and death.In Koolhaas an animal, whether Tip the pig or Frederick the rabbit, is a character like Kafka’s Josef K, a unique individual of flesh and blood, yet also, to the reader, an everyman.

One of the most stimulating of post-war Dutch authors.

Alle dierenverhalen

Biologist and writer Midas Dekkers once said that he felt Anton Koolhaas was entitled to the Nobel Prize for Biology, since ‘he alone penetrated to the core of what biology is all about’, namely the question: What is it like to be an animal? In the famous story 'Mr Tip is the Fattest Sir', Dekkers discovered an answer to the question of why pigs and other livestock can be calmly led to the slaughter.

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