Gus Kuyer. The Book of All Things
It's a very very cool book; I can't even call it a children's book. Not so long ago, I realized that the division into children's and non-children's books is somehow wrong. Good books, films, and plays range from a certain age to a hundred years, or longer, whoever gets lucky. I've seen such people more and more often lately: Miss Charity, The Jellyfish Report, Alice in Wonderland translated by Yevgeny Klyuev, Waffle Heart, and even The Fox and the Bunny. So, of course, I had seen such books before, but I didn't understand it, I thought they stayed when I was a child, books that I had once read a hundred times...
So, I'll tell you about another such book, The Book of All Things. You can read from 11 years to infinity.
It begins with a cool preface in which the author talks about how he wanted to write a book about his happy childhood, where dad played the violin every evening and his mother sang, where there were holidays, guests, love, and this book was supposed to be, according to the author, such a textbook of happiness for people, but suddenly he met the main character of his future book, he just came to him himself and talked about his childhood, and about During this childhood, it was impossible to write a textbook of happiness, but it was impossible not to write it either. And the book turned out, and another one. It's about where unhappy adults come from, and how these unhappy adults, in turn, if they don't understand their childhood, raise unhappy future adults. We also knew how children can talk to God, but then we forgot how to talk to God. About angels crying when children face terrible injustice, one that is bigger than their height. About how to overcome fear and fight Goliath, even if he is bigger and older, and should always be right. How do you even learn to tell the difference between good and bad. Here is the sister of the main character, the same boy Thomas who, when he grew up, came to tell a writer about his childhood and thus deal with him and him, his sister, “stupid as an onion”, did he think she was good? No, “I'm not good,” she says about herself, because she threatened her father with a knife, and he read in her eyes that she was ready to carry out the threat. Yes, Thomas answers this question for himself, because she protected him and his mother. Yes, my daughter answers the same question, “Margo is kind,” she writes in her review, “but I didn't like the knife scene.” So when you're kind - when do you forgive everything? Or when you're ready to stand in the way of evil: “She looked like an angel,” Thomas wrote in The Book of All Things. “Heaven's most dangerous angel. The one with a blazing sword.” Could an angel be dangerous? Well, these are the kind of questions the Book of All Things raises; by the way, the title is very correct.
Did you have a “book of all things” when you were a child? Such a book for thoughts) I had more than one) I wonder where those notebooks are now, I would like to read them)
In general, thanks a lot to the Samokat publishing house for another discovery. And special thanks to the translator Ekaterina Toritsyna. In fact, I genuinely admire the skills of the translators that Samokat collaborates with. I've never liked reading anything in translation, I've always seen “seams”, but they don't exist here, and this is magic and aerobatics.
And here's my selection of quotes:
“- By the way, what do you want to be when you grow up?
- A happy person, - Thomas replied confidently. - When I grow up, I will be happy.
Mrs. van Amersfoort had already taken the book out of the closet, but then she turned around in surprise. She looked at Thomas with a smile and said:
- What a damn good idea. Do you know when happiness starts? When you're no longer afraid. “And I handed Thomas a book.”
“Thomas thought about what his mom said to him. That you don't have to listen to your father, the main thing is that he doesn't know. And that she's happy. He had a feeling something was wrong here, but he didn't know what it was.”
“Margot stopped being afraid,” Thomas wrote in The Book of All Things, “and turned into a witch in front of me.”
“But my father was still standing. He stared helplessly into Margo's eyes. Thomas saw that her father loved her. And him. And mom. He saw that his father wanted to stay but wanted to leave at the same time.”
Marina Melnikova
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