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Protect nature and man, even in one of the most hostile and difficult environments, such as the great North. The cold, the ferocious animals, the men searching for gold: everything is a slalom between life and death. Peter Sís with his Little Big Story from the Far North restores a fairy world for children and a longing for the world for adults. His images oscillate between dream and reality, the nuanced colors incline towards life and new tracks to find stories, friends, solutions.
On the trail of the explorer Jan Welzl
The volume, just translated by Adelphi, comes from a real character: the explorer Jan Welzl, whom the author heard about when he was a child. The illustrator, in fact, was born in Brno, Czechoslovakia in 1949 and, during his childhood, grandparents and uncles told him about that young Jan Welzl, who lived towards the end of the nineteenth century. He was 25 years old and was a blacksmith but one day he chose to leave that anonymous life to go on an adventure. He had two hands, he too had a great desire for discovery and so he went towards Siberia with a cart and horse. Then, he leaves those too for a sleigh pulled by a reindeer. By now he too was a man of the great North and arrived at the Bering Sea and, from there, at the Island of San Lorenzo. Peter Sís, winner of the 2012 Hans Christian Andersen Prize, tells a fragment of that adventure. When Jan gets lost in the white and finds the help and support of the Eskimos. They don’t understand each other but the strength of life and hospitality do everything and above all Jan understands that he is surrounded by humans who know how to have fun because they are in total symbiosis with nature. Jan learns to build a waterproof kayak, sneak up on a bear, trap a seal in an ice hole, and fish at a river mouth.
Respect for Nature
The identification with nature is total as the colors of the drawings also suggest. But in this life of finite things Jan sees a danger: the Eskimos blindly trust foreigners. Gold miners arrive with rifles and whiskey to raid and make their fortune. But luck is a remote, slow, infinite time. It is the time of nature in which everyone can do their part, starting with a question: What can I do to protect my friends? The Far North speaks to everyone as the explorer Jan Welzl through his books, including Thirty Years in the Golden North. The great North is the quintessence of time, far from the useless buzz of the world: curiosity for life, courage, moral integrity and love for nature.
Peter Sís, Little Big Story from the Far North, Adelphi, pages. 44, €18