“On a mild autumn morning, Oscar was doing his daily digging when he discovered a magnificent wooden chest.”
Does this opening sentence raise questions in the mind of an adult reader? It certainly does. But even if you pause briefly to ask why Oscar digs every day — and whether child protective services should be alerted — the attractive picture book A CHEST FULL OF WORDS (NorthSouth, 48 pp., $19.95, ages 4 to 8), by the frequent collaborators Rebecca Gugger and Simon Röthlisberger, soon sweeps you along. Because what Oscar finds in this long-buried chest is a tangled treasure of words — and they are, intriguingly, quite fancy words at that, such as bulbous, docile and featherlight. Wow.
As Oscar begins to apply these adjectives to objects in his vicinity, the reader stops asking pitiful irrelevant questions and falls into the habit of pointing at an illustration and matching it to a single delightfully descriptive word. “That lighthouse is fuchsia,” you say proudly. “And that bear is winged.”
If I were to apply adjectives to Oscar, I would describe him as practical and perhaps worryingly-adept–with-tools, but also, crucially, teachable.
When he opens the chest, he is at first disappointed, as he had hoped for something cool, like a slice of pink cake or a diamond. Attempting to make the best of the situation, he extracts the word fluorescent and tries playing with it, but it’s no fun at all, so he airily tosses it into a shrub and walks off.
Where does the adjective land? On a hedgehog, which suddenly becomes bright yellow and glowy!
An incredibly fast learner, Oscar immediately takes the word hairy and slaps it on a tree; he fires grandiose at a birdhouse from his slingshot; he realizes (too late) that monstrous should be used with care, especially around insects. The trouble is that in no time, while successfully changing the world around him, he has emptied the chest, and is left, if I may say so, forlorn.
How Oscar finds words on his own is the rest of the story. You get the drift: Words (specifically adjectives) are magical and ubiquitous. You can paint a picture with them.
Meanwhile, there is nothing basic about the adjectives offered to this book’s intended young audience. In fact, if any children of your acquaintance start calling things “pear-a-licious” or “forest-floor-squishy,” you will know what they’ve been reading.
Oscar’s tale, translated from the German by Tim Mohr, was first published in Switzerland. ASHIMPA: The Mysterious Word (Transit Children’s Editions, 40 pp., $19.95, ages 3 to 7), by the author-illustrator Catarina Sobral, is a Portuguese import, and I suspect it worked better in the original language. In this picture book, translated by Juliana Barbassa, the linguistic lesson is rather different, and possibly more profound and terrifying in its implications, depending on how far you want to push them.
The meaningless word ashimpa is discovered in a “dusty old dictionary” by a dusty old scholar in a library, and it becomes insanely fashionable overnight. But what part of speech is it? A verb? A noun? An adjective?
There is loud disagreement. Do people “ashimp”? Can you buy and sell “ashimpas”? Do you like that item in the window or does it seem a little “ashimpish”?
Politicians and broadcasters jump on the ashimpa bandwagon, and an alarming linguistic nihilism abounds.
Remember how Lewis Carroll’s Humpty Dumpty declares, “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean”? And then adds, “The question is, which is to be master”?
I am totally willing to believe that Sobral’s innocent, playful intention was simply to introduce children to parts of speech and entertain them in the process. But honestly, if Humpty Dumpty had invited Kafka and Orwell up onto the wall to devise a totalitarian language universe I wouldn’t want to live in, they couldn’t have done a better job.
On the plus side, Sobral’s crazy-angled, collage-y, crayon-y illustrations are a perfect fit, and there is a marvelous double-page spread celebrating beloved bookshops around the world, which bibliophiles will gratefully slaver over. In the midst of the ashimpa madness, it’s an oasis of reassurance, which presumably is the point. We see the famously soggy Libreria Acqua Alta in Venice; Lello & Irmão in Porto (with its J.K. Rowling connections); and the magnificent El Ateneo Grand Splendid in Buenos Aires.
I did wonder how the relatively humble Barter Books in Northumberland got to be included, though. Being a Brit, I’m a fan of this vast secondhand book emporium situated in a disused Victorian railway station in the remote and chilly northeast of England. I mean, truly, everyone should visit it — if wrapped up warm — especially since it’s also home to the original “Keep Calm and Carry On” poster. But I initially said to myself (and I’m not proud of it), “Barter Books? What the ashimpa are you doing here?”
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