Giant

 ‘Giant’ is a poetic story floating in the surrealistic atmosphere created by Klaas Verplancke. Together with ‘Nelly’, it forms a diptych about the necessity of friendship and companionship.

Giant is tall and thin, a melancholy thinker. Half the world lives between the roof on Giant’s head and his toes in the cellar. And yet he’s lonely. He’s left bald and bereft when the wind snatches the roof off his head. He hears the voice of the Wind’s Child everywhere, but can’t get a hold of her. His loneliness grows until Giant goes to lie alone in the snow.

What follows is one of the most dramatic images in the book: the trees around his head give Giant, numbed by the cold, the appearance of a suffering, Christ-like figure complete with crown of thorns, shut out from the human world for being different. The people want to help Giant, but they lack the means to do so. That which is an umbrella for a person is just a thimble to Giant, and human food nothing more than a crumb.

After a long journey, he meets the Wind’s Child and finds a home in the world of stories and imagination: a house that he’s not too big for. The Wind’s Child also shows him how you can travel in stories, see new places and meet new people.