Customer Reviews

The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily

5 star:		(2)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

Dino Buzzati's THE BEARS' FAMOUS INVASION OF SICILY has the appearance of a children's book with a much more subversive political message at heart. The book starts with the author's charming illustrations and brief character descriptions- of the Bear Marzipan, the Bear Dandelion, the Bear Merlin, Marmoset the Cat and others. This introduction of the major players and their driving character traits has a theatrical almost overture-like effect of setting the stage for the action that follows.

The plot reads as a magical-realist, forgotten history lesson of Sicily and the long wars and strife between bears and humans. The overriding themes of the book involve the corruption of humans and the real moral risk faced by the bears when they begin to adopt the airs and aspirations of their human counterparts. Few children's books deal with war or politics and none so inventively. It works beautifully for the child reader and adult reader alike. A mature young reader (for example a child who easily picked up on the allegory of the Narnia Chronicles) will discern much about human/bear nature and an adult with some exposure to history will read more into the sections on war and politics. In spite of basic premise (the ease with which power and decadence corrupt) it has a healthy dose of humor, magic and hope to balance the reality.

The New York Review of Books deserves high praise for bringing back the neglected classics for the enjoyment of both children and adults.

Parent and grandparents who think children ought to be shielded from reading fiction about love, honor, war, sacrifice, timidity, valor, betrayal, selfishness, vanity, illness, death, renunciation and the importance of self-awareness should on no account give Dino Buzzati's The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily to their small relatives.

In my view, the book allows children of the middle years and older to safely explore and discuss some of the big dark secrets of life, particularly adult life. With its unsentimentally stylish illustrations, intermittent, sometimes howlingly reached rhymes, but most of all its memorable characters, The Bears lives on in this hardcover version published by the New York Review Chidren's Collection.

Smaller in format then the orange cloth-covered original, the new edition sacrifices some of the visual impact of the full-page color illustrations. The pages of the new slick hardcover, too, lack the heft and hand of the immediate post-World War II original with its almost fuzzy post-scarcity paper. Those differences, though, are more than offset by the pleasure of having the book widely available again.

This is a big serious book about love, death, morality, human weakness, betrayal, talents hidden by misleading first impressions and the tendency to underestimate people who do not on first impression win favor in conventional eyes. The motive forces of love and tenderness, the importance and difficulty of discerning who is giving reliable advice, and who is not and why, the need for accuracy of information when making important decisions and of timing in determining whether action will be effective or not--like all good fables, the book teaches important, universal human lessons in readily accessible narrative form. That even wise and noble leaders may be mislead by plays upon their vanity-with disastrous consequence--is another lesson that never goes out of style.

Like Maus, The Bears uses non-human characters to wonderful effect, lightening and diffusing otherwise didactic purposes and effects. Buzzati's command of narrative is skillful and elegantly understated. The arc of the story begins in the mountains with a Prince's departure and ends there with a King's return. The mood is sometimes frolicsome, more often somber, even elegiac. The writer's journalistic discipline provides every detail needed to support plot, story, characters.

For a Hollywood ending, your young people are well directed to other books. To expose children--not very young ones, to be sure, perhaps starting around ten, depending on the child-- to appealing examples of empathy and the nuanced complexity of the human condition, not to mention the glory of word play and the pure, laugh-out-loud joy of silly rhymes, The Bears Famous Invasion still wins five stars in my house.

May 18, 2008

The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily

Dino Buzzati (1906-1972) is an Italian writer that should be better known. Two of his books are outright masterpieces: The Tartar Steppe and the Mystery of the Old Forest (the latter one, as far as I know, untranslated into English so far). The Bears Famous Invasion of Sicily, written originally in 1945, is not a masterpiece, but is very much worth reading. In appearence a fable aimed at children, it's really much more. For one, it's pretty violent, so it might not be a good idea to give it to young children. The story, which was only translated into English recently, takes place in a mythical, medieval Sicily, where the bears, led by their king Leander, are forced to come down from the mountains due to the lack of food. Once in the lowlands, and without much thinking about it, they overthrow the human kingdom and take power over them. The story is basically how the bears, who were terribly naive when they were living in the forest, are corrupted by the exercise of power. The book includes some fine drawings by the author itself.

The Bears' Famous Invasion of Sicily, by Dino Buzzati, is about:

1. Tony, the son of Leander, King of the Bears, is captured by humans living in the valley.

2. During a food shortage in their mountain home, the bears attack the humans, eventually winning and becoming the "new nobility."

3. Leander finds his son, who was turned into an acrobat.

4. The bears abandon their healthy "bearish" lifestyle, borrowing from humans the wearing of clothes, gluttony, and other assorted sins.

5. Leander saves his bears from themselves.

How you get from point 1 to point 5 is the whole point of the story. Between these two end points are monsters, ghosts, thieves, betrayal, battles, ogres, death, sleuthing, and magic. There are illustrations and poetry.

I accept that this is categorized as a book for children, although it is probably for older, not younger, kids. The killing, killing, and killing described in the first half makes me think about this as a book inspired by a major war (it was written by an Italian author in 1945). I'm not sure what the perversion of the bears is supposed to represent.

In other words, is this just a yarn, or a story with deeper meaning? As a yarn it seems dated, and as a meaningful story it seems shallow.

Apparently, the newer edition has a summary of each chapter written by Lemony Snicket, asking questions of the reader. The original New York Review book has no such addition.

Easily, and painlessly, overlooked.

One terrible winter, King Leander leads his troop of bears down the mountains of Sicily in search of food. Along their jouney, the bears encounter an army of wild boars, a wily professor who may or may not be a magician, ghosts, snarling Marmoset the Cat, and, worst of all, treachery within their own ranks. Can King Leander and his troop of bears endure this treacherous adventure? It is for you to find out.

Violent, cynical, on occasion frankly bewildering... The plot of the book is that the bears come down from the mountains to invade; most of them die, and the ones who survive are corrupted by the evil ways of humans.

For what could bears do, armed with arrows and spears and such trifles
Against culverin, cannon and grapeshot, and muskets and rifles?
The rifles crack, the unsullied snow turns red;
Who'll dig a grave to hold so many dead?

The Duke upon a sheltered slope
Observes it through a telescope
While the courtiers, to show how victorious their team is
Have painted his lens with a bear "in extremis"
So wherever he looks as the bloodshed increases
He sees only bears cut into pieces.
"Tell me, Your Excellence, what do you see?"
"A bear with his leg chopped off at the knee."
"And now, Your Excellence, what see you there?"
"Nothing but dead bears everywhere."
...

Now begins a hurly bur-
Ly, shrieks and yells and /Sauve qui peut!/
One runs away, one leaps the ramparts
And falls into the ditch's damp parts.

On the whole, I found it precious and depressing, but that's how I feel about the Lemony Snicket books too. Maybe if I was a little boy, I'd get a kick out of it.

I purchased this book for my son, based largely on other reviews, and great expectations for a series from the New York Review of Books. I'm writing this review, in large part, to temper those expectations for other potential readers.

I won't review the story here, as an overview has been provided in both the editorial review and reviews by otehr writers.

I found the writing very stilted and awkward, moving back and forth from a play-like (theatrical) presentation to third person narrative, and indipersed with bad poetry; not engaging child-like poetry (like Dr. Seuss, e.g.) just bad poetry.

There were too many characters for a young child to keep straight and follow through the story, and few well developed. There was not enough action to engage a yound child. Yes, there are lessons taught, and morals learned in the reading, but, it is not an entertaining read...it felt more like something you might trudge through as required reading.

I look for great books for my children, not wanting them to waste their time on drivel. I would not describe this book as shallow or empty, just a difficult read, and not particularly entertaining. I wish I'd checked this one out of the library (instead of purchasing it), as I'm fairly certain that neither I nor my children will want to read it again.