Anodyne
Sunday, May 08, 2005
 

One last title: Russell Hoban's Mouse and His Child (1967), illustrated by Lillian Hoban, which I did not read as a child, but as a 20-something adult in Elliot B. Gose's kids' lit class at UBC in the early 1990s. My favorite children's book of all time, which includes a sophisticated parody of Beckett's Endgame as performed by a troupe of talking animals, many strongly-rendered depictions of nature, and a powerful child's-eye view of the world unmatched by any other kids' book I know. The currently in-print version has tasteful illustrations by an artist whose name I almost immediately forgot; Lillian Hoban's illustrations are absolutely essential to Russell Hoban's text, and the book is diminished without them.

Russell Hoban: "The Mouse and His Child was a book in which I had an idea from a toy. When I wrote the book these were almost impossible to obtain, but the same company made a number of other toys of similar type and I used a clown-juggler for a stand in. At that time, I lived in Wilton, Connecticut, by a pond in which there were snapping turtles and dragonflies and frogs and all kinds of things. And I had a little pond aquarium in my study in which I had for a time small catfish and a snapping turtle and various kinds of larvae. And I had the clown-juggler standing in the bottom getting rusty with his clothes coming off and so forth. And I actually saw the dragonfly nymph metamorphose out of that aquarium and fly out of my window. A remarkable thing to see." Posted by Hello
- posted by cjb @ 10:08 PM


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