Saša StanišićKatja Spitzer
Hey, hey, hey, Taxi!
[Hey, hey, hey, Taxi!]

Parents know just what it feels like at the end of an arduous day to stand by their child’s bed hoping that he or she will follow the script and go to sleep at long last. It’s always a tricky moment, as it’s not easy for a child to cross the threshold from wakefulness to sleep. Rituals can be a big help, such as the child habitually asking for a story. Prior to capitulating in the face of this request, exhausted parents should take a quick look at Saša Stanišić’s new book Hey, hey, hey, Taxi! with its seemingly endless torrent of stories – though the individual stories themselves do have an ending, always in the form of an assurance from the narrator to the listening child that he’ll ‘soon be back’. There is a hint here of the father’s guilty conscience, for he is often away from home, and his absences always begin with him climbing into a taxi on his departure, and end with him climbing out of another on his return. But while the image of the departing taxi reflects the child’s sense of loss, it also serves to fire their sense of adventure, for no sooner has their dad clambered aboard his humble taxi than it turns into a stage coach rattling across the prairie past grazing bison and masked bandits.
Who would have thought that Saša Stanišić, winner of the 2019 German Book Prize, would come up with a collection of children’s stories? They owe their origin not only to bedtimes, but also to joint rambles and birthday gatherings. They have much to do with the function and delights of literature. Like all good stories they are intended to give pleasure, provoke benign puzzlement, and stimulate thought. To that end, Stanišić wholeheartedly approves when his stories prompt an interplay of questions and answers – and there is certainly no shortage of questions that the listener might wish to ask. Bursting forth as it were spontaneously, these tales are the product of an unbridled delight in storytelling, situated in locales such as a kindergarten for animals, in which a wise and wary fox shows his young charges the true nature of the world. But the taxi also whirls its passengers to the realms of dragons, giants and bats; it is a miraculous machine that can travel both forward into the future and back into the past. To seek to stir up our sense of the world through language, to imagine it as something quite different from what we normally perceive it to be – these are amongst the most fundamental aspirations of literature. And for Stanišić of course there is always plentiful scope for imaginative word-play.
More often than not the writers of literature for children and young adults are chiefly concerned with their chosen topics – but what interests Saša Stanišić is rather the ways that children experience fear, courage, injustice. This is also why the stories are left completely open. One minute the taxi might be boarding a pirate ship, the next it may be involved in an adventure with a robot. The child listening to any of these  stories is free to extend the rumbustious plot-line and imagine an ending quite different from the one provided. The book is thus suitable not only for pre-schoolers but also for children who are already beginning to read for themselves.
In her illustrations Katja Spitzer displays the same sort of verve that animates Stanišić’s exuberant narrative. Scarcely ever earthbound, her figures mostly swoop to and fro above the page, their bodies lithe and supple as though ready to leap off at any moment in a new direction. Spitzer’s illustrations are two-dimensional in style, with everything happening in the foreground as in children’s drawings – which she mimics with great finesse, using a bold colour palette in which dark blue, turquoise, pink and yellow are directly juxtaposed.
Everything is possible in this book, which amasses creative ideas in great big heaps and then either arranges them like so many building bricks into neat stories, or else jumbles them up with cheerful abandon.