Children's books The high art of book illustration
Donnelly, Daria
III minated manuscripts Daria Donnelly Here's the assignment: Read the story of Cain and Abel (King James version please). With the text reprinted on lovely thick stock, draw one marginal...
...Especially grand is the sequence of pages in which Hansel and Gretel re-main in the same position, but the back-ground changes: First they are prostrate in the woods, exhausted from their search for food...
...That redis-covery of truth, something both her par-ents fought hard for, also gives her courage in her struggle against school bullies...
...Get it into your child's ear...
...then they are prostrate with angels descending to console them...
...All chil-dren (each of us, once a child) know this truth of loss and longing...
...The pover-ty is actual...
...She has just brought out an illus-trated bible, Stories from the Bible (North-South Books, $19.95, 160 pp., all ages) that, no exaggeration, will change the way you read the book...
...He lets himself have fun showing the boy, astonished, riding a goose, ap-proaching a puzzled wingless owl, inch-ing across a stick suspended between mountains in order to distribute his wares...
...An immense quiet sur-rounds them...
...Directly behind, Zwerger places the daughter of Pharaoh, a wisp of a figure accompa-nied by a huge attendant and an even huger umbrella...
...Set next to Zwerger's illustrations, the Bible stories seem wildly theatrical...
...the second of Miriam and company swish-ing their ample hips while beating tri-umph on tambourines...
...And it is a traditional coming-of-age story, the struggle of an adolescent girl to find her voice...
...and let me know what you think...
...The book is worth having just for the picture of the ex-hausted baby leaning on a punt oar...
...Burningham really knows how to convey fatigue with the light-est of touches (the strokes of pen that make the eyes do much of the work...
...A small boy com-pletes creation by giving a basket full of wings to creatures so that bugs and birds can fly, and windmills can spin...
...At the center of that happy page, showing children in pro-cession with Hansel and Gretel holding the magic wand, is a benign smiling sun...
...You may even remember the moment in which the world (of mother and father or of larger proportion) which once seemed perfect and whole, no longer appears so...
...Sis remains faithful to the sweet spirit of the story...
...This is the moment before the cruelty and shame of the story it-self: two brothers sitting to-gether as they must have done for days and years be-fore the story...
...The story of Joseph is out, David is in and dwelt upon...
...For all that, this is not a "conservative," monarchical version...
...And finally, in the spirit of the chil-dren's game Telephone, I pass on a tip from Gregory Maguire...
...Top among these I would put Hushabye, written and il-lustrated by England's John Burning-ham (Alfred A. Knopf, $14.95, ages 3 and up...
...Let's read these stories...
...The alter-nation of full-color illustration with a pencil drawing of the larger landscape is quite lovely...
...My son adores this series: "This is a writer who knows how to make a kid laugh...
...A great Emily Dickinson verse, but not quite what one wants children to live by...
...With the text reprinted on lovely thick stock, draw one marginal illustration...
...There are images I will never forget: Gantos picking his face over and over as he waits to go to trial is one of the more benign...
...Here's what you probably will not draw: Two young men seated facing each other, one stroking a goat, the other cradling a bowl of fruit...
...Between the women are a calm body of water and a round shadow cast by the umbrella, perfectly echoing the shape of the mother's skirt...
...Should we count on it...
...Taravant, a French diplo-mat, originally wrote the tale for his son...
...But against these trends, Zwerger re-claims the high art of illustration, not as As for the indirection, here is an ex-ample of how she uses it to comment...
...And try to ignore those idiosyncratic italics...
...The book puts the truth of prison right in our faces: it's very, very frightening about what human beings will do in hate and despair...
...It is an arresting picture, true to the emotional gravity of both the moment and of Moses' entire life...
...The witch, unlike many versions of the tale, is im-personal and mythical, one of many scary creatures of the woods...
...His vision is rooted in the experience of Italian Catholicism: "Being Italian," he once told a reporter, "I was practically born in the church...
...The boy, exhausted, dies...
...The jealous wind eventually steals the basket and hurls the wings into the ocean (where in an interesting image waves are wings seeking flight...
...I recommend the book for adults, but not for anyone under seventeen, unless a parent previews it...
...Is the com-passion he was ultimately shown by one interested state worker available today...
...A self-sacri-ficing poppy gives her petals to a cater-pillar, allowing him to become a but-terfly, so that there is no longer need for the wing giver's basket so the crea-tures can have flight...
...Tibet: Through the Red Box, about his father's travels there), will bring many more readers to this story...
...His final book, Hansel and Gretel (Atheneum, $17, ages 4 and up), sums up a life's work in opera and in children's books...
...An illustrative focus on scenery or background is the particular genius of Beni Montresor, who died this past October...
...It introduces readers to international politics, to refugee policy, and, quite sketchily, to the con-flicts in Nigeria and Somalia...
...Zwerger bases illustrative choices on her regard for poetic knowl-edge or what might be called the wis-dom of images, and that makes all the difference...
...In the end, the children triumph over what menaces them-hunger, fear, things that cannot be named but are em-bodied as witches and devils-and the story concludes: "everything ended joy-fully for everyone...
...In her Carnegie Award-winning novel, The Other Side of Truth (HarperCollins, $16.95,252 pp., ages 10 and up), Beverly Naidoo tells the story of two Nigerian children who are smug-gled into England after their mother's murder...
...Studying it, I finally grasped the con-nection between the story of the bulrushes and Moses' death before entering the Promised Land...
...And the man is funny...
...the New Testament extends beyond the Gospels to Acts, Paul, and the New Jerusalem...
...Montresor illustrated the fantastical 1965 Caldecott-winner, May I Bring a Friend...
...This Bible will never be top of the pops: The King James language is won-drous but not transparent...
...What I like about Burn-ingham's selection is that he mixes pure-ly quirky animals (the cat mother strolling through a snow storm) with animals who have storied associations (the three bears pointing as they do to Goldilocks...
...It's a terrific example of the axiom "context is all...
...It's a well-told story, one which works on several levels...
...tells the story of an adolescence gone sour in drugs, pretense, and drug smug-gling, and of his terrible stint in prison...
...Great illustration can expand the reach of a story...
...Gan-tos's new memoir, Hole in My Life (Far-rar, Straus and Giroux, $16, 200 pp...
...Doesn't that sound intriguing...
...That sun is repeated alone on the last leaf: a great emblem of the Good (call it what you will: God, love, the benign) that Montresor believed is the last word on our world...
...Also accompanying her, in this spirit of juxtaposing the grave and comical, are two Egyptian gods (Zwerger has a fine sense of humor, as the little monkey peep-ing out of Eden's tree testi-fies...
...Gantos wanted adventure so that he could be-come a writer...
...There is no dynamic of duped father/wicked stepmother, or of not wishing to share the little there is with children...
...He lives in Thoreau's hometown and has just published his fifth "Hamlet Chronicles" novel, Three Rotten Eggs (Clarion, $16, ages 7 and up...
...That drawing and angle of vision are the particular genius of Lisbeth Zwerger, one of the great living chil-dren's book artists...
...Among these are a collection of Hans Christian Andersen stories, a selection of poems by Christian Mor-genstern (the German Edward Lear), and illustrated full-text versions of The Wizard of Oz and Alice in Wonderland...
...And the selection is unusual...
...Maguire is a Catholic novelist, critic, and all-around angelic connector of people in the chil-dren's book world...
...This is the shadow, the landless water world, in which Moses, nei-ther of this riverbank nor that, will always dwell...
...But he discovers that to write you have to do it, and not turn away from anything that you see or feel or experience...
...Illustrators have many ways to build bridges between the biblical world and our own...
...Their gaze is cast down-ward, their costume nine-teenth-century rural roman-tic...
...They make their way through the social welfare system, with the older child, Sade, telling slanted truths be-cause she is afraid, disoriented, and traumatized by her mother's violent death...
...It was later transcribed in Le Monde...
...Montresor is in top form, working with bold colors and paper-cut silhou-ettes...
...Gradually Sade recovers her ap-preciation for the truth, and fights back against bureaucrats who have impris-oned their father in England for his own subsequent illegal entry...
...Two books for older readers take up the question of truth-telling...
...This is where most illustrated Bibles come down...
...And speaking of books in which story and illustra-tion are perfectly matched, will Goodnight Moon con-tinue to be the bedtime book of the cul-ture...
...A last pair of wings is found, and he becomes the first angel...
...I had never noticed how over-the-top the Passover story is (How many plagues...
...More to the center of the illustrative spec-trum is a direct rendering of the words into images, with fidelity to the time pe-riod and to the details and emphases of the text...
...Very likely, given its quirky beau-ty and power...
...He writes princi-pally for children but has adult works as well, among them the highly ac-claimed Wicked...
...For the turth, he has to abandon all the self-escape, the lying, drugs and the patterns given him by a family that literally moves every year...
...Because they are so strong, Zwerg-er's illustrations set up a counterpoint to the text itself...
...How many riders in the sea...
...It's a hair-raising tale, and though I loathe it when critics call books brave, this one earns the adjective...
...Zwerger, who is Austrian, has many books for children, and having won the prestigious Hans Christian Andersen Medal, now illustrates only books of her choosing...
...Tell all the Truth but tell it slant- /Success in Circuit lies...
...But other contenders should be collected...
...Once landed in England, the children are abandoned by the woman paid to take them to a relative...
...I've written about Jack Gan-tos and his excellent novel, Joey Pizga Loses Control, in a previous column...
...He was also a set de-signer for opera and for Fellini films...
...Hansel and Gretel follows the opera by Engel-bert Humperdinck, right down to the page in which you can count the four-teen angels of the opera's best-known song...
...A cat and her children, a baby, three bears, a fish, the man in moon, a goose, and a frog are tired, need to go to bed, and do...
...The Little Wing Giver follows the spirit and lineage of The Little Prince, and like it, is quirky, fine, and right at the edge of the sentimental...
...until I saw it accompanied by a mere two illustra-tions: the first of a gentleman carrying two jammed satchels and a child...
...by Beatrice Schenk de Regniers, one of my most treasured childhood books...
...I grew up surrounded by pageantry, imagery, fantasy...
...For a month I have been sitting with Stories from the Bible thinking about why it is so beautiful and true...
...Gan-tos is also the author of a funny, fine picture-book series about a less-than-perfect cat named Rotten Ralph...
...The illustration of Moses' birth and res-cue, the most gorgeous in the book, fore-grounds Moses' mother and the moment of her surrendering him to the bulrushes: Moses is enclosed and unseen, signified by the basket that already separates him from her...
...In Maguire's words, the best of these childhood tales, real and imag-inatively reshaped, "convey the elu-sive succor of Catholic mysticism with-in the strict setting of a moral tale...
...Like the opera, Montresor's pre-sentation is mythical and spectacle-based, not interior or psychological...
...As I was typing the last paragraphs, I was excited by Maguire's praise in the Horn Book magazine for a collection of "elliptical and epiphan-ic" stories, Counting Stars (Delacorte, $18.99, 209 pp., ages 14 and up), by David Almond, whose roots are rural Catholic...
...Their father is a progressive journalist and the deadly bullet was in-tended to shut him up...
...And the mother is too...
...My favorite is her delicate illustrations for Oscar Wilde's wondrous moral tale, The Selfish Giant...
...Contra current reticence about this Chris-tian symbol, a cross adorns the title page...
...Zwerger uses theatri-cal coloring (see the amazing striped pants in the Garden of Gethsemane il-lustration), but she has a quiet imagi-nation and is domestic in her focus...
...Rather here the majesty of the tale and telling is given its due and is anchored in the everyday drama of life...
...Gantos said he wrote the book because he is alarmed by the turn in our society toward punishing teens for their mistakes rather than forgiv-ing or offering guidance...
...The truth of the Bible that she wants to put before us is about separation and restora-tion: the fall from Eden, the loss of moth-er, and the promise of loving restora-tion to the Garden, to the Land...
...One strategy, taken by DK publishers, is to do so empiri-cally: sidebar illustrations show what people at the time wore, what coins they used, how sacrifices were practiced...
...In fact, if there is any complaint about the book, it is that one longs for more illustrations, though in fact the interior stillness pro-duced by this version depends on that parsimony...
...The Czech-born Sis, who has a considerable following for his philosophical, so-phisticated books (The Three Golden Keys about Prague...
...Hushabye has a felicitous visual and verbal rhythm...
...That is the case with The Lit-tle Wing Giver by Jacques Taravant, il-lustrated by Peter Sis (Henry Holt, $14.95, ages 5 and up...
Vol. 129 • April 2002 • No. 8
