10 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
The Story Can't Unite the Hithering Thithering Graphics, December 25, 2006
This review is from: The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine (Hardcover)
What Donald Barthelme has apparently done is take a collection of mildly amusing 19th-century engravings and, as an experimental attempt at a children's book, write a short story around them. The story is a wandering and observing of various silly characters and scenes, like Alice in Wonderland, without Carroll's creativity*, yet not without some fun and wit. The character who most comes to life is a knitting pirate who makes sardonic comments and tells the story of his capture by the Chinese. Like the rest of the text, the pirate's story is cobbled together to match the pictures. He goes abruptly from a storm at sea (a full-page illustration) to being under Chinese attack. Not that I don't appreciate the nice little conceit of telling a story within a story in a book where the text, if gathered together, would add up to six pages.
* Despite Barthelme's penchant for forcing words into new parts of speech. He turns hither into hithering, thither into thithering, flourish into flourishy, and footloose into footlooseness. But it's tinkery -- see, even I can do it -- and trivial compared to Carroll's Jabberwocky-quality word creations.
In an earlier version of this review, I complained that the heroine is stiff, wooden, and uninteresting. However, when I reread the text, I didn't see that problem, and I wondered what made me think that. It's the illustrations! Barthelme had only one engraving of his main character, but because she was the heroine, he had to show her more than once. So six times (counting the cover), here is the same fancily dressed girl, holding a hoop, staring impassively back at the reader. One exception is on page 12, where someone, possibly Barthelme himself (or possibly the daughter with whom he collaborated on this book), attempted a small, original drawing of Mathilda and the pirate, standing in profile next to each other. But it is obviously by a different artist. To a lesser extent, Barthelme also reuses engravings of the pirate, the djinn, and Mathilda's parents. He crops the repetitions, resizes them, or mirror-images them, to try to make them look different, but they are still repetitions and therefore give the book a monotonous feel. And most pictures blend poorly with each other and with their monotone backgrounds and are clearly cut-and-pasted. So experienced readers, except a few literati who are in awe of Barthelme, will see a collage that is less than the sum of its parts. Children will be more forgiving. But even children need a smooth, professional flow of text and pictures to draw them into the fantasy.
On pages 60-61 of
Talk, Talk: A Children's Book Author Speaks to Grown-Ups, E.L. Konigsburg explains some of the politics behind this book's winning of the 1972 National Book Award for Children's Literature. I agree that the award was undeserved, but I disagree with the assertion that this is not even a children's book. While The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine is not a great children's book, children can find some enjoyment in it. --There, I think I've managed to annoy both the Barthelme clique and the children's-books clique.
The story line is not a bad idea for a children's book: Mathilda enters a mysterious Chinese house on a quest for a red fire engine. Politely but persistently, she asks her "djinn" guide for a fire engine. By the end of the book, she has received ALMOST exactly what she wanted.
Here are the major reasons why I think this book earns three stars: The whimsical artwork (the originals on which the book is based, not the repetitions), the witty conversations, and the lesson for young readers: Specify the color. Minor reasons are the hard cover, the spacious layout on the large pages, and the implicit challenge to look up "djinn" in a large dictionary or a search engine.
I bought this 30-page book for my 11 year old granddaughter as a companion gift to
Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (Signet Classics), with the wonderful illustrations by John Tenniel. The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine amused her and whetted her appetite for Carroll's two masterpieces.
So much for my first book review. Reviewing books is harder than reviewing gadgets!
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3.0 out of 5 stars
Navel Gazing, November 27, 2011
This review is from: The Slightly Irregular Fire Engine (Hardcover)
I was deeply impressed by and influenced by Barthelme's work in my youth, and still consider many of his stories classics of the form. As something of a completist I was intrigued by this book.
Well, I think the kindest description of the book would be "indulgent". Barthelme often amused himself by including the odd "victorian" cut out in his works, although I never saw the point. Well, here he got to really let himself go, and covered his tracks by calling it a children's book. Tedious and not the least bit interesting or amusing.
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