Øyvind Torseter

Discovering a hole in the middle of his new apartment, the protagonist of this text-minimal picture-book from Norway is surprised, dismayed, and then determined to get to the bottom of the matter. Eventually capturing the hole in a box, he takes it to a lab for examination, but discovers that even the scientists there can't give him definitive answers. Intriguingly, the protagonist's hole is clearly not the first phenomenon of this nature that the lab workers have seen. Eventually our hero returns home, where he makes ready for bed, eventually falling asleep...

Originally published in Norwegian as Hullet, this interesting picture-book revolves around the die-cut hole in the center of the book - a hole that goes through the outside binding and all of the pages. This hole provides an interesting focal point, visually speaking, for author/artist Øyvind Torseter's illustrations, and I think my favorite scenes were the ones in which our protagonist first discovers the hole, and then is surprised when it seems to move around. Of course, the physical hole that has been bored through the book does not move, it is the protagonist and the artwork that shifts around it, making some of these scenes very clever indeed. I chuckled when our hero stumbles over the hole, now at his feet. The scenes subsequent to the boxing of the hole, although also clever - the hole is an eye in one scene, an "O" in a sign in another, and an actual hole in the ground in yet another - didn't work as well for me, in terms of storytelling. No doubt I am too literal, but because the protagonist had purportedly captured the hole in his box, its physical persistence on other parts of the page distracted me from the story. Leaving that aside, the artwork itself had a quirky charm, and a minimal quality - minimal color palette, lots of white space on the page - that worked very well with the tale. I have encountered Torseter's illustrations before, in Håkon Øvreås' children's novel, Brown, but was happy to peruse it again.

Innovative, clever, entertaining - The Hole is a picture-book I would recommend, despite my feeling that it didn't always quite work, in terms of the interaction of the physical hole and the story. Although quite long for a picture-book, at sixty-four pages, it never feels like a drawn out or laborious read, perhaps because the text is so minimal and the artwork so engaging. For my part, I will definitely be seeking out more of Øyvind Torseter's work.… (plus d'informations)