Sometimes I’m an Explorer

‘Sometimes I’m an Explorer’ has no overarching story, no plot and no recurring characters. In unconnected short texts, new talent Ruth Mellaerts draws the reader into familiar situations, memories, thoughts and feelings. Using simple words, she paints clear and poetic pictures of someone recognising his dead father in the silhouette of a postal worker, of someone saying goodbye to her childhood home where the little holes left by pins evoke a museum of children’s drawings, of ivy that once wrapped itself around a birch tree and now holds the stump of the felled tree in a final embrace.

These fragile and subtle texts ought to be consumed a little bit at a time, and the atmospheric illustrations of Charlotte Peys and Toon Delanote are instrumental in this. With phenomenal precision, the duo strips the book of its momentum by providing drawings that are not obvious but enter into a genuine dialogue with the text. The interaction between words and illustrations lifts the book to a higher level and creates calm and beauty as well as words to ruminate on. ‘Sometimes I’m an Explorer’ is medicine for the soul, to be taken in carefully measured doses.