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Book Review: The Singing Bones by Shaun Tan

The Singing Bones by Shaun Tan
Arthur A. Levine Books, 2016
ISBN-13: 978-0545946124
Available: Hardcover

 

My most memorable previous experience of Shaun Tan’s work was the surrealist graphic novel The Arrival; a touching, wordless tale of an immigrant arriving in an unfamiliar place. The art and story together have a powerful impact in showing the universality of what it means to be a stranger arriving in a strange land, using unique images to communicate what words are unable to. The Singing Bones is completely different, but it also expresses universality using images with a powerful visual impact.

The Singing Bones has an introduction by author Neil Gaiman and a foreword by fairy tale scholar Jack Zipes, clues that the reader is in for a fascinating tour of the Grimm brothers’ tales. Tan pairs snippets from stories by the Grimm brothers with photographs of minimalist sculptures based on the stories. The sculptures were influenced by the styles used by Inuit and Pre-Columbian people. and are mainly made out of paper mache, found objects, and clay, primarily in red, black, and white. Each is presented in a double-paged spread, with the story snippet on the otherwise blank left hand page and the photograph of the sculpture it inspired on the right. The lines and curves in the sculptures are clean and uncluttered. Some sculptures represent the story fully– the one devoted to “Rapunzel” could be a tower, or a girl, or both. Others show a single moment– the one for “The Frog King” depicts the frog’s head poking out of circular ripples at the moment just before he would have spoken to the princess.  The first look is not enough; while the sculptures may seem simple, reading the snippets and spending time looking at the photographs of the sculptures reveals that there is a lot to see in what might seem like uncomplicated objects. Be advised that these are not Disneyfied stories; Tan includes the story “Mother Trudy”, which has a very unpleasant ending for the child protagonist. There’s a very primal, visceral feel to the experience of going through these pages. The photographic spreads are followed by an explanation by Tan of the process used, and then by an index that fully summarizes the Grimm’s tale associated with each sculpture.

I discovered this book in the children’s section of my library, and I’m not sure it belongs there. As an art book and an exploration of Grimm’s tales, it is outstanding, but in a very nontraditional way, and I think many adults would really enjoy it. However, while my nine year old was enchanted by it, it also gave her nightmares, and required considerable discussion and research as a follow-up. It was a good experience for us together, but would have been difficult for her on her own. I can highly recommend it for elementary-aged and middle school children with an adult as a read-and-share title, and as a stand-alone title for ages 14 and older.


Posted on March 10, 2017 by , Reply

Kelly Link, Small Beer Press, and Weightless Books

Kelly Link is one of the most original writers I have come across in many many years of reading all kinds of things. She started out writing for small press, and in the past few years had a collection of short stories for teens, called Pretty Monsters, published by Penguin, and reviewed here. I first discovered her work when I was looking for books published by Shaun Tan (I had just experienced his graphic tale, The Arrival) and once I started reading, I couldn’t stop with just one story. I told everyone who would listen to me about the book, and was very excited to have the opportunity to interview her last summer when the paperback edition of Pretty Monsters came out.

Pretty Monsters was not her first book. Stranger Things Happen, her first full length collection, was published in the small press, by Small Beer Press, in 2001. This is the book Karen Russell described and read from on NPR recently (here’s a  link to Karen Russell’s introduction. If you’d like to listen to her read from the book, you can do that from this page too). Karen claimed that Kelly’s work transcends a librarian’s ability to catalog it. Which is nonsense. To quote one of my favorite essays “Librarians can catalog anything… They can even catalog you.” Even though we can (and do) catalog Kelly’s work, though, she is an amazing, boundary-defying writer. In addition to writing, she also is a college professor, and runs both a zine (Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet) and Small Beer Press, with her husband, Gavin J. Grant.

When I learned about the story on NPR, I was inspired to revisit Kelly’s website, where I learned that Kelly and Gavin had published an ebook called Sea, Ship, Mountain, Sky. A new book I could try… I had to find it. A link sent me to Weightless Books, which I had never heard of. But it’s a pretty neat place! It’s a small, independent online bookstore, and it provides an opportunity for writers to publish things that don’t fall into established categories, for small presses to make their works available, and for readers to acquire DRM-free ebooks that can be downloaded in a variety of formats to a variety of devices. Weightless Books does appear to be selective about the authors and publishers they will accept, but also appears to be slowly expanding its offerings, and many of their titles fall into genres such as science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction and, yes, horror. It’s an interesting place to explore, and I encourage you to check it out. I think Sea, Ship, Mountain, Sky is a fantastic story,  and I like the philosophy behind the site. Amazon.com is well-known, and library wholesalers capture a significant chunk of the library market. Places like Weightless Books will make it possible to fill in gaps for audiences who want to read interesting authors and books from interesting presses, that aren’t available easily in any other way.

Once again, Kelly, and Gavin J. Grant (who runs the site) rock.

 

Posted on July 24, 2011 by , Reply

A Look Into the Mind of Shaun Tan

In May, artist Shaun Tan won the Astrid Lindgren Memorial Award, a sort of equivalent to winning a Nobel Prize in picture book illustration. I can see why.

Shaun Tan is an amazing illustrator. I first came across his work while reading Kelly Link’s short story collection Pretty Monsters, reviewed here, and loved his illustrations so much that I tracked down some of his other works, including Tales from Outer Suburbia and the incredible graphic novel The Arrival. If you aren’t familiar with The Arrival, you should be. There are no words.

And that is what is coolest about this interview he did for Der Spiegel. Rather than giving lengthy, wordy answers to the questions they posed, he sketched in his answers. I love this approach to interviewing an illustrator, and particularly to interviewing Shaun Tan, who expresses himself so beautifully without any exposition at all.

Congratulations, Shaun. I look forward to seeing what you come up with next.

Posted on June 26, 2011 by , Reply