![]() The aim seems to have been for a book whose impact would be classical, not contemporary. One reason that Where the Wild Things Are feels so fresh today is that in fashioning the illustrations Sendak largely avoided timebound visual references. As has so often been pointed out by now, even the illustrations as they ratchet up and then back down in trim size seem first to devour and then to disgorge the available white space of successive pages. In the primal logic of the book, seeing and being seen become synonymous with eating and being eaten, loving and being loved, and, as in a sort of Blakeian bargain, all sources of nourishment are revealed as potential sources of annihilation. However familiar the Sendak images have long since become, however far afield of their original purpose those images have occasionally migrated, Wild Things has yet to shed its initial fascination as an epic staring match in which the reader gets caught in the crossfire. Turning to the book now, the most striking thing about it remains its undatable, fresh-as-paint immediacy. A second look at Where the Wild Things Are? Forty years after Maurice Sendak’s early mid-career masterpiece first appeared on the fall 1963 Harper list, the suggestion still feels premature. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |