Over time, the time-efficient Scandinavian post-Montessori spectrum has taken over children’s window display hardbacks. Wolves no longer eat grandmothers, no one insults anyone, and texts often become parental tools to teach children practical things: to use the potty, not to wet the bed, to fall asleep, to manage emotions, to accept little brother on the way. And without the terrifying charm of Pierino Porcospino with his macabre epilogue. Books for children and teenagers occupy about a quarter of the publishing industry, and like any commercial product they adapt to a changing society, as is normal..
Over time, the time-efficient Scandinavian post-Montessori spectrum has taken over children’s window display hardbacks. Wolves no longer eat grandmothers, no one insults anyone, and texts often become parental tools to teach children practical things: to use the potty, not to wet the bed, to fall asleep, to manage emotions, to accept little brother on the way. And without the terrifying charm of Pierino Porcospino with his macabre epilogue. Books for children and teenagers occupy about a quarter of the publishing industry, and like any commercial product they adapt to a changing society, as is normal..
In most cases it is all so educational that it seems like being at school, and not even in a moralistic 1968 poetic way, à la Rodari, à la Cipì, à la Lionni. And not even with the irony of a Munari. Of course, not all books have this pragmatic approach, but upon entering the children’s section of a bookshop we find sections born from the hyperfunctionality of the Zeitgeist for parents in a hurry to educate. The boredom of Peppa Pig’s bigot. And as we get older we don’t get into the didactic intricacies of rebellious girls, a very successful brand, or biographies on hero judges – Falcone & Borsellino for kids – or the Kennedy brothers (Veltroni even wrote one, sic). Nor do we open Pandora’s box of race & gender themes that are so popular in American bookshops, Harvey Milk for babies, Black is the proudest color, It was the night before Pride, etc etc. and which instead are banned in Florida libraries and given away by the hyper-progressives of Park Slope.
But in short, there isn’t much room for interpretation anymore. “By reducing a work of art to its content, and then interpreting only that, you domesticate it,” he wrote Susan Sontagbut there is very little to tame here, the books already arrive with the collar.
And instead, voilà a bit of vintage freshness thanks to Adelphiwhich in his series for children (which is called I cabbages as a snack) continues the translation and publication by Maurice Sendak. Died in 2012, a Jew from Brooklyn, homosexual – he was partnered with a psychoanalyst – he must have had a good temper, faced with a negative review by Salman Rushdie of one of his books after insulting him he says: “I had to call the Ayatollah”. Sendak had become very famous for his book In the Land of Wild Monsters: a child in punishment who finds / creates a parallel world full of strange creatures that he manages to tame, of which he becomes king, because he is wilder than them. Yiddish culture shines through, and so does Eastern European melancholy. It is no coincidence that Sendak also illustrated the stories of Isaac B. Singer. His grandfather was also a rabbi. In other books we also find some images of the Holocaust, a reason that led to his splendid The Kitchen at Night being included in the list of controversial books by the American Library Association: the cooks a bit Oliver Hardy with Hitler’s moustaches, the naked child stuck in the oven. “I refuse to lie to children”, he said to those who criticized the crudeness of his stories. In Bombo-Lardo the grotesque figures at the orphan pig’s birthday party recall Grosz’s German expressionism. In The World Out There, one of Sendak’s best books, a baby is kidnapped by goblins and replaced by an ice puppet; the double-page illustrations seem to challenge space-time, as in an Escherian landscape. Why can’t children’s books be a little scary, a little absurd, sophisticated?
Sendak’s beauty, in addition to his virtuoso pencil, lies precisely in the freedom left to the questions: What is happening here? Is it dream or reality? Who are the good guys, who are the bad guys? It is the spirit of adventure that we find in these pages that makes us become (strong) readers and makes us face life with chaotic energy (and not with petulance and normative feelings of guilt).
