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Nadia Budde’s first picture books: Eins, zwei, drei, Tier and Trauriger Tiger toastet Tomaten have garnered numerous awards, including the German Youth Literature Prize. Yet, if her idiosyncratic characters and stories don’t always appeal to everybody, the author and illustrator is considered one of the most popular and well-known picture book artists in Germany.
In her most recent book, Choose Something, But Hurry Up! she tries her hand at a new genre, and in the process has created something very special; a childhood memory that lies somewhere between comic book and graphic novel, picture book and autobiographical novel.
As the subtitle reveals, the book consists of ten loosely linked chapters. The story of her East German childhood in the 1980s is not told chronologically, but episodically, and it takes place both at her grandparent’s house in the country and at her mother’s in East Berlin. The narrative thread spans the two poles of city and country and each of the stories are woven around the memories they trigger.
Thus, the book begins with a poster that the narrator discovers beyond the Wall in West Berlin: "Cut the bullshit about your grandparent’s country”. "Grandparent’s-country", the narrator reflects, she’s got something like that and starts describing: the women with their headscarves and aprons, the chain-smoking men with visor caps, the peasant women and tractor drivers and how they all looked the same. But then her memory deepens and distinctive idiosyncratic details surface: her grandmother’s dyed black hair and golden earrings, her grandfather’s war wounds that don’t heal and the special smell of his neck.
Nadia Budde uses simple, but trenchant language, she prefers short sentences and a streamlined sentence structure - the narrative voice seems to be that of a child. And, at first sight, the illustrations seem drawn by a child. The images are mostly populated by large-headed figures, sometimes eliminating the body entirely. Awkward lines form the contours of bodies; the faces consist of two circles for the eyes and a couple of lines for the nose and mouth. And yet, these few tools are enough for Nadia Budde to create expressive facial expressions and accurately drawn characters – including such well-known figures as Heidi or Herr Rossi which she often hides in densely populated puzzle images.
The characters usually appear as vignettes on a white page, she avoids using large-scale backgrounds. Nevertheless, the pages are dynamic because Budde adds hand-lettered text - again, looking childlike, but easily readable –which cleverly integrates yet another design element into the illustrations or is inserted as further vignettes.
Text and images are inextricably linked. On a double-page spread she shows a group of prefabricated buildings that the narrator and her mother live in. The narrative text which is set in a banner over it reads: In the city there were no animals, "but my grandparents were always thinking about their animals when they came to visit us." The grandparents are seen in the foreground: "Just like rabbit hutches," the grandmother thinks when she looks at the prefabricated buildings, "like battery cages," is written inside the grandfather’s speech bubble.
The almost childlike perspective of the narrative voice is always the starting point for effective plays on words, allowing new perspectives on what is being reported and leading to unexpected twists. Moreover the seemingly childish naiveté has an ironic component that offers adult readers an additional level of reception.
Nadia Budde’s real skill lies in the special way she is able to bring the reader and viewer close to the things: She twists and turns them, illuminates them from all sides, until it seems as if they are palpably in front of you, what’s more, she even begins to take them apart and reassemble them. At the end of the first story, for example, she creates many more signs out of the banner "Cut the bullshit about your grandparent’s country!”. One reads "Grandparents rise," and there they are, emerging from their graves. And now the memories flow freely, now the imagination knows no bounds.
You can see the book’s special quality-- when it comes to death there is always a large portion of humor mixed in. A particularly successful example is the episode about the grandparent’s cats who were always called "Meow": "It was practical. The village street had lots of traffic. They’d have to keep coming up with a new name for the cats. My grandmother wrote a letter saying: "By the way, Meow died again.'"
Nadia Budde writes in one of her clever chapters that "time is a swarm of houseflies," showing us a child’s perception of the world. Here she looks at time through a child’s eyes, those moments when time seems to stretch endlessly like a house fly monotonously turning in circles. But one thing is certain: time flies when you are reading the book.
Eva Jaeschke
September 2010
[Translated by Zaia Alexander]
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