Hats off to Klassen’s splendid simplicity

WHAT IT IS: A page from I Want My Hat Back, a 2011 picture book by Jon Klassen, the Winnipeg-born, Ontario-raised writer and illustrator who just won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, a Swedish prize for contributions to children’s and young adult literature.

This honour, worth almost $750,000, comes on top of an American Caldecott Medal, a British Kate Greenaway Medal and a Governor General’s Award here in Canada.

Klassen’s books are also global bestsellers, now translated into 27 languages. They are lauded by critics and librarians, but — most importantly — they are adored by the kids and parents who read them.

Again and again and again.

WHAT IT’S ABOUT: I Want My Hat Back, the first entry in Klassen’s trilogy of chapeau-related stories, upends many conventional expectations about contemporary children’s books. The pictures are minimalist in form and muted and monochromatic in colour, with a deliberately deadpan tone.

In this offbeat and understated little tale, an unnamed bear has lost his much-loved hat and sets out to find it. He makes polite inquiries of the creatures he comes across, until his problem is resolved in a dark, funny and very sudden turn.

Here the bear is experiencing a brief emotional crisis, giving way to some worried thoughts about the hat he misses so much.

The 44-year-old Klassen works a lot with nuances of brown — dark brown, golden brown, burnt umber, buff, beige, ochre, ecru — and shades of grey. He compensates for the limited colour palette with layers of texture, often achieved through a mix of gouache, charcoal, ink and little digital tweaks.

Klassen also favours plain backgrounds, often with empty expanses of sky. This bareness gives small visual details outsized significance.

The action often happens off the pages, between the pages, and the dialogue is quiet, even terse. Klassen’s characters — turtles, armadillos, snakes, foxes, fish — can appear inexpressive, at least at first. In I Want My Hat Back, feelings of sadness, suspicion, surprise and guilt are suggested with just a slight narrowing or widening of the bear’s eyes.

Klassen’s work draws on some vintage sources — the plain and pared-down picture books influenced by 1960s modernism; the low-key loveliness of Arnold Lobel’s Frog and Toad series; the sneaky humour of William Steig (known for Doctor De Soto and Abel’s Island); the absurdities of Gary Larson’s The Far Side cartoons.

Many readers — kids and grown-ups alike — find Klassen’s work laugh-out-loud hilarious. A Guardian reviewer called I Want My Hat Back “the funniest book ever written.” But his stories can also be a bit melancholy, picking up that line of sadness that runs through children’s lit, from Hans Christian Andersen to Oscar Wilde to Maurice Sendak.

And things can even get a bit existential and grim, maybe not surprising when one considers that Klassen also cites as influences Samuel Beckett, Cormac McCarthy and Alfred Hitchcock.

WHY IT MATTERS: There has been a recent trend of famous musicians, actors and athletes (including Kelly Clarkson, Matthew McConaughey, Reese Witherspoon, Jimmie Fallon and Meghan Markle) deciding they can write children’s books, maybe because they think children’s books are simple.

But as non-celebrity writers and illustrators will tell you, simplicity is incredibly hard to get right.

With his sparse words and economical images, Klassen crafts the kind of simplicity that asks for close attention and allows for complicated responses. Rather than spoon-feeding moral messages to readers, Klassen gives kids lots of room to explore, interpret, question and learn.

This might look like a big goofy bear pining for his hat, but his predicament resonates way beyond the pages of this brief book.

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