Hanne Kvist

Hanne Kvist, born 1961, is a writer and illustrator, and both forms of expression unfold convincingly in an enriching interaction in the picture book To af alting (Two of everything).

A mother and father tell their son that he will have two of everything because they are getting divorced. But the boy's world falls apart. He has his dog Uffe and otherwise sees himself surrounded by half things. He just wants to keep two parents and one of everything else.

The word story is kept in a sober, descriptive and minimalistic tone, even when the tornado as a metaphor whizzes through his life and splits his home. The parents' happy message of their son's gain from the divorce lives on in the language when the parents individually present new step-parents, new siblings and a new dog, Effu. But the havoc caused by the tornado and Uffe's actions contradict the parents' version of reality.

The picture story describes in simple, straight lines and sublime collages the break up of the world the boy lives in: halved house, halved piano, halved TV and halved sofa. The development of this natural disaster has a distinct expression as the horizon rises higher and higher up long sides of the pages of the book. In this way the sky, which incidentally consists of a bookkeeping page and an atlas index, squeezed together, while the surface of the earth spreads across the picture so the dog can dig down to a home in the depths.

Here we find the boy and the dog along with the TV, the sofa and the piano, which has been repaired, and father and mother can come to visit each in their own corridor in what the boy says is not "a play house, it is a home".

Hanne Kvist has managed to create a genuine picture book that consistently maintains the child's perspective. Slowly, discretely and unwaveringly certain, she expresses herself in a highly successful interaction between verbal and picture language, that says divorce does not happen for the sake of the child, and the apparent gain is a loss.

When To af alting (Two of everything) despite this, ends on a tone of hope, it is because the main character has managed to create his own coherent world cut off from the adults.