Geniuses at work

Commonweal, Nov 20, 1998 by Daria Donnelly

A renaissance is under way in children's literature, and alongside the ephemera, an astonishing number of true and beautiful books for young people now can be found on library and bookstore shelves. The strongest confirmation that we are living in a moment hospitable to serious artistry came this spring when the long-silent giant, Tomi Ungerer, began to make books for children again. Forthwith follows my view of the best of the latest, and some reflections on the picture book prompted by Ungerer's exhilarating return.

The most lyrical and perfectly crafted picture book of 1998 is Snow (Farrar Straus & Giroux, $16) by Uri Shulevitz, the story of a boy who rightly believes that it will snow, despite the predictions of radio, television, and proximate adults that it will not. Every element of the book is right: the typography is beautiful, the language is economical and witty, the pacing impeccable, and the pictures set in marvelous colloquy with the words (on the page, "but as soon as one snowflake melts another takes its place," a subtle watercolor mark suggests a snowflake has melted straight into the paper). When above the words "floating floating through the air," which seemingly refer to snow, the statues of Mother Goose, her gander, and Humpty Dumpty (!) make their graceful gravity-defying descent from a bookstore facade to join the boy and his dog on the facing page, you know you are in the presence of the purely magical thing that only picture books can do.

Snow also testifies to the lost worlds that picture books remember: worlds of childhood that have gone under not only to time but more violent forces. Author Shulevitz, born in Warsaw in 1935, is a child of war. The gentle exchanges of courtesy and suspension of gravity in this Eastern European cityscape as it disappears under snow counterpoise the destruction witnessed by four-year-old Shulevitz during the Warsaw blitz, which he recalled for Lee Bennett Hopkins in Pauses: Autobiographical Reflection of 101 Creators of Children's Books (the loss of stairs in his apartment building, and his ensuing terror, perhaps the deep source of Humpty Dumpty's magical descent).

The great makers bring everything to the picture book (no repression, just tact) and they also use all the physical elements of the book without apology. They know that the book's primacy as conservator of the past depends upon the fact that its pages can turn either way, forward to unfold the visual and verbal narrative, and backward to be reviewed and lingered over. (The movement of a book is different from that of television, video, and computer, and the best children's books know it!) G. Brian Karas's lovely, The Windy Day (Simon and Schuster, $16), uses to great effect the left and right pages as indicators of before and after. A wind blows into a tidy town from the left, inspiring a tidy boy's vision when he turns to face it. Earlier, daydreaming at school, the boy had been gazing in the other direction, right toward a blank window and wall. The wind refreshes and animates the boy's sense of the past, all the bits and pieces he had learned at school swept up into a thrilling drama that moves rightward into a now richly promising future. The Windy Day is a delicate and rare portrait of the inner life of a schoolchild.

Far from being irrelevant to modern children, the old stories - myths, folk and fairy tales, Bible stories - seem almost to have written us into being. In her adult collection of fairy tales, The Old Wives' Fairy Tale Book (Pantheon, $15,242 pp.), British novelist Angela Carter says that folk tales, once the universal entertainment of the poor, are "the most vital connection we have with the imaginations of the ordinary men and women whose labor created our world." In myths and in the Bible our children discover our most important narrative professions of cosmology, theology, ontology. When I select retellings of these stories, I look for books that are tactful but don't excerpt a vital unpleasantness.

In presenting the classical myths, no one has yet surpassed Ingri and Edgar Parin d'Aulaire's 1962 Book of Greek Myths (Doubleday, $24.95, 192 pp.) for visual information, entertaining and graceful storytelling, or for organization. The Illustrated Book of Fairy Tales (DK Publishing, $19.95, 160 pp.), retold by Neil Philip and illustrated by Nilesh Mistry, is a fine new international collection of folk and fairy tales. The nine-year-old I read it with ignored the trademark DK information sidebars in favor of the fifty-two pithily told stories themselves.

I prefer the leisurely pacing of single-story books and highly recommend the Armenian folk tale, The Golden Bracelet (Holiday House, $16.95), retold by David Kherdian and illustrated by Nonny Hogrogian, which embodies the satisfying reversals of folk tales and more rarely, a perfect balance of power between men and women. When a peasant maiden, Anahid, demands that her carefree suitor, Prince Haig, learn a craft before she will consider him, he labors to acquire the skill of weaving, which wins not only her love but later, in a twist on the Philomela myth, his freedom. Kherdian's sinewy retelling is perfectly balanced by veteran artist Hogrogian's incarnation of emotion in the simplest of gestures.