A Book Review

Kate DiCamillo can render vivid and stunning scenes with simplicity. She can create heartbreak with a single sentence. She can lead you line by line through a story and have you hanging on every word. Her seemingly magical mastery of tone is perhaps unparalleled in contemporary children’s literature. The problem with DiCamillo comes when one recognizes that she could potentially use this incredible linguistic power to enchant the reader with any story, however poorly plotted or characterized. Mesmerized by the charisma of her written word, we may not even realize that we were actually reading a very silly book. Now, I’m not saying that The Magician’s Elephant is a silly book. I’m just saying that I am so drawn in by DiCamillo’s writing style that it doesn’t really matter what tale she’s telling, I want to read and hear the whole of it.

So, the tale at hand: Peter Augustus Duchene, an orphan boy in an imaginary European city, is sent to the market with money given him by his guardian, an aging, ailing soldier. Instead of buying bread and fish, he gives the money to a fortune teller. She informs him that his deepest hope is true: his sister is alive. Furthermore, in a perplexing and cryptic instruction, the fortune teller counsels Peter that an elephant will lead him to his sister. Two days later, a magician, performing before the rich and noble of the city, intends to produce a bouquet of lilies for the audience. Instead, in a burst of hubris, he calls forth an elephant. It crashes through the roof of the opera house and lands in the lap of one Madame LaVaughn, permanently crippling her legs. The magician is imprisoned, and the citizens of the entire city, most especially Peter, become obsessed with the portentous pachyderm, very much still in existence but hidden in an undisclosed location in the city. A succession of short scenes given from the perspectives of numerous characters, including the hapless elephant herself, moves the story towards some magical eventuality that promises to provide something great for everyone, i.e., a happy ending.

My only complaint with the story is that, unlike the endings of traditional fairy tales, DiCamillo perhaps spreads the happy ending too thin between too many characters; many of them do not seem to have passed through the extreme magic-curse-based ordeals which are usually required to earn a fairy tale ending. Instead, they have passed through more realistic ordeals: disease, loneliness, guilt, poverty, etc. In a relatively short book such as this, these trials and burdens don’t necessarily impress themselves as strongly on a reader as, say, being pursued by a man-eating giant or being forced to live in a castle with a monster. The magic displayed in the book is as out-of-the-ordinary to the characters in the story as it is to us; DiCamillo clearly wanted this magic to happen in some place resembling the real world.  Even the elephant, who the other characters look to as a magical being, does not consider herself magical and is as confused and powerless as anyone to the magic that has occurred.  She’s just an elephant that has suddenly found herself in a strange, cold place without friends.   DiCamillo is quoted on the back flap of the book as saying, “I wanted, I needed, I longed to tell a story of love and magic.” It may be that the book, although dealing with magic, is more a fable than a fairy tale; all along the way, we read scenes that illustrate despair and hope, empathy, perseverance, charity, and forgiveness. Perhaps the magic DiCamillo so longs for the reader to see is nothing other than love itself, and thus it is only appropriate that she would want to spread it around to as many characters as possible.

Stylistically, as well as story-wise, DiCamillo walks the line between fairy tale, fable, and magical realism. The book is filled with beautiful, imagistic scenes and dreams that are described with the succinctness and surrealism of prose poems. The magical elements are reported matter-of-fact-ly alongside the many realistic elements of the story. Cold, overcast skies and snow storms are so vividly realized, right down to the footprints of the elephant in the snow, that the reader more readily identifies with what the characters are feeling. Sly authorial interjections do occasionally pop up in the text, (“And what did the magician say? You know full well the words he spoke,”) but they do not seem to be as pervasive as they were in Desperaux. For better or for worse, this time around we don’t receive any of the author’s idiosyncratic definitions (although there certainly are a lot of new vocabulary words for young readers in this book.) As in her other books, the strong built-in storytelling voice lends itself to a great read-aloud experience.

All in all, we have another magical little book from DiCamillo. Is the story ridiculous? You know full well it’s ridiculous; all fairy tales and fantasies are. It is nonetheless a beautifully rendered and engaging book, filled with fables of hope, empathy, forgiveness, humility, and love that will speak to children and adults alike. Four-and-a-half stars.

The Magician’s Elephant
Written by Kate DiCamillo
Illustrated by Yoko Tanaka
200 pages
ISBN: 978-0-7636-4410-9
Release Date: September 8, 2009
www.themagicianselephant.com
www.katedicamillo.com
www.yokotanaka.com

We met at an art exhibit. We met in the comment section of my blog. We met in a snowstorm in a cottage in the mountains. We met at a symphony concert, sitting next to each other. We met at Family Home Evening and commiserated because we both hated Family Home Evening. We met at the library and traded poems. We met in the Provo temple. We met in empty parking lots and Mexican restaurants and our parents’ houses. We met at a movie theater where we were both making fun of the movie. We met at IKEA, buying bookshelves. We met at an art supply store. We met at a little Chinese place by the hospital. We met on the yellow BART line between San Francisco and Lafayette. We met hiking on a trail in Millcreek Canyon on the last nice autumn day before winter.  We met to shovel snow under the full moon.  We met because we both liked a painting by Brian Kershisnik.

I feel that one of the idiosyncratic usages of this blog deserves a slight explication, since I continue to use it:

In his poem that prophesied of the first 28 years of my life¹, T.S. Eliot wrote, “Do I dare / Disturb the universe?” (45-46), and later, “Do I dare to eat a peach?” (122)

I just decided to change it to a beet.

The beet is a quiet, unremarkable root vegetable. It grows beneath the ground, and someone must dig it out. It has a strong flavor and a rich, deep color that can stain. It actually has a lot of sweetness to it. It’s not everyone’s favorite. In fact, it may not be anyone’s favorite. But still, the beet waits patiently in the cool of the cellar for its time to come. I like it in salads and on hamburgers.

New things will be coming shortly. Enough with the photograph cop-outs.

Earlier today, someone in Rzeszw, Poland googled the phrase “watch me crank that robocop,” and google directed this person to my blog. I’m not sure why, but everything about that just makes me really happy. Already established as one of America’s finest young poets, our boy soulja has now transcended all boundaries of language, time and space. He does indeed tell them, after all.

So basically the only hits I get on this blog (other than just random hits) come from the keyword search “Joshua Clover.” A month or two ago I wrote a post explaining that I had started reading Clover’s collection The Totality for Kids. Since then I haven’t ever looked at that post, but I have the feeling it was somewhat ignorant, and I am embarrassed when I see traffic from servers such as “The Office of the President at UC Davis,” being specifically drawn to that post, because it’s not all that academic up in here. But really, I am going to advocate that there is nothing wrong with that. Really, I find it a kind of sad commentary that contemporary poetry, even in comparison to other sub-cultural nitches, is so-little-blogged about that my little Joshua Clover entry from a month or two ago is still up there in a noticeable place on the search results. Of course, there is the possibility that, since I share a first name with said Clover and my blog is called Josh’s Froz-T-Freez, at least one of the visitors to my site thought that maybe they were happening onto Joshua Clover’s actual blog (he does have an actual blog by the way, called Jane Dark’s Sugar High. It’s worth checking out.), rather than the semi-destitute blog of a substitute teacher/temp secretary/possible aspiring school librarian from Utah.

At any rate, if you go ahead and google or technorati any contemporary poet’s name, you’re not going to find all that much being written on the blogoteca. Certainly less than they deserve. Maybe a couple of biographical blurbs from some institutional websites, maybe their name included on a reading schedule for some university or organization. That’s about it. You just don’t find that many people casually geeking out about Haryette Mullen or Frank Bidart on their blogs, the way you may find people doing so about Daydream Nation, scrapbooking or almost any other subject. Even Extreme ironing. Don’t we who love poetry love our poetry as much as those that love other things love their things? I think we do. Contemporary poetry needs more fanboys. Poetry needs its own Pitchforkmedia to enthusiastically report on things like when Craig Arnold’s next book is going to hit stores, W.S. Merwin’s public reading itinerary for 2007 and every time Jorie Graham has a poem published in a literary magazine. So I, for one, am going to try to post more about poetry on here, to help fill up the internet with a quantity of nonsense about a new subject area.

And as for Joshua Clover? I got sick of his book really quick. Too many references to things I didn’t know about and had no desire to investigate. So I read Star Dust by Frank Bidart instead. Insofar as you can consider a collection of poetry a pageturner, Star Dust was to me a definite pageturner. Bidart always is, in my opinion. Need to read more Bidart. Right now, I’m re-reading Mullen’s Sleeping With The Dictionary. I read it several years ago in college after one of my professors name-dropped it semi-sneeringly, and I liked it then, but I’m getting a lot more out of it now. Before, I don’t think I ever really got past the “fun with words” veneer to the subtlety and subversiveness beneath. But you don’t have to take my word for it: de-Doot-DOOT!

Yay for poetry!

p.s. It turns out Joshua Clover teaches at UC Davis, so it’s possible he’s googling himself, which seems kind of sad, but then I’d probably do the same thing. So, if it’s you, Hi Josh! No, I won’t accuse him of that. It’s more likely to be one of his students or colleagues. Or I guess the President of UC Davis? I’m starting to feel more and more that I might get into a little bit of trouble with this post. Probably not though.

For the past week or so I’ve been flipping through The Totality For Kids by Joshua Clover. I heard him read poems from this book a few years ago before it was published, back when I was in college and used to go to readings. I was wanting to read some newish poetry and I somehow remembered his name and lo and behold there was his book at the library. I’m enjoying it. Kind of John Ashbery-ish, which in my opinion is a good thing, only it’s a little more young and hip. But then, maybe I’m off base. I’m just reading this for enjoyment and craft, not criticism.

Before that I read The Wanderings of Oisin and a bunch of other early poems by W.B. Yeats. Oisin is just awesome, a fantasy narrative poem based in Irish mythology. I’ve never read anything quite like it, except maybe Beowulf, and parts of The Odyssey and Metamorphoses. Not bad company to keep. This poem is sort of an anomaly, and probably out of favor these days. I’ve always secretly wanted to write things like this, but was continually pushed in a very different direction by creative writing classes in college. Hard to get away with in 2007 unless you do it ironically (lame), plus you’ve got to have the chops to pull it off, and I don’t know if I have the chops yet. I guess there’s only one way to get them.

Next up: Sleeping With the Dictionary by Harryette Mullen.