Brian Selznick’s Locking Masterpiece – The New York Times


KALEIDOSCOPE
by Brian Selznick

Two children lying on their backs inside a large wooden sphinx contemplate life’s riddles.

Brian Selznick’s shiny new book “Kaleidoscope” is a collection of magical, weird and mysterious stories.

A widow isolates herself to write an encyclopedia of all human knowledge – and dies decades later, still in the middle of the first entry: the apple. The entrance is so long that its pages fill an entire house.

The stories seem to be connected. There is always a first-person narrator; there is usually a boy named James; the narrator loves James. But they do not fit into a single narrative, or even a single world. Sometimes James dies; sometimes becomes king of the moon to “make sure the universe is safe for dreaming”.

A man steals and hoards beautiful objects to soothe himself in the face of the world’s immense pain, but in a fit of anger and despair he shatters them all. He then uses the glowing shards to make incandescent scenes of disaster.

Each story is accompanied by art, which is as dazzling as we’ve come to expect from Selznick. We get two parts per story – first an ever-changing display of shapes divided into crystalline forms; then, on the next page, the broken scene: a ship, a dragon, a clock, vines, a castle.

A mysterious narrator takes a boy to a library where books tell the story of everything that has ever happened and happened. intent be. The boy wants to know where you are her is the story. But the narrator does not know, does not know, although he wrote every book himself.He doesn’t even remember what he wrote. The boy goes crazy: Whatthe purpose of knowing everything if you forget and you canCan’t even figure out where the answers are?” Later we find the boy desperately trying to organize the books. The omniscient amnesiac narrator, this was an impossible task, but this gesture touched me in some way.

Indeed, in the middle of the “Kaleidoscope” I was frustrated like a child. I wanted more—a secret narrative to be uncovered, a key to unlocking the book’s secrets. Surely some young readers will feel this way and lose interest. But readers of all ages who love literature will find intriguing questions and images that refuse to fade into the mind. While each story may seem like part of a larger story that we’ll never learn, we get the impression that we’ve heard the best part. Maybe that’s enough.

Inexplicable, ever-changing lights shine on a forest near a small town. What are the lights? “Sometimes I think they are angels,” says one child. “And sometimes I think they’re Martians… but… mostly, I just think they’re beautiful.”

In an author’s note, Selznick says she wrote “Kaleidoscope” in isolation, three months apart from her husband, and it really does feel like Covid art. Not because he was dealing with a virus (fortunately), but because he was filled with longing, with isolation. almost One can split with surprise, anger, and wonder at the fragile grace of life.

In a garden or Garden, a dragon offers the narrator fruit from the Tree of Knowledge. The narrator thinks and then refuses: “If I knew everything, there would be no mystery… no wonder. … There would just be … answers.”

There are no answers in this amazing book. It’s just the two of us – Selznick and the reader – lying side by side on the belly of a sphinx. Not trying to answer a riddle. I just appreciate being in the middle of someone.



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