Due to a Tender Skin

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 sold

Publisher
Van Oorschot
Mark Pieters
Mark@vanoorschot.nl

Rights
Stella Rieck
Rieck@cossee.com

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).