Culture. Eat it
30 October 2017
Brian Selznick in Wonderstruck makes extraordinary the ordinary.
Consider two stories that run parallel, the first in 1927 and the second one in 1977.
Choose as two protagonists, Rose and Ben, both eager to find their place in the world.
Don’t eliminate from the narration anything that life wouldn’t have: difficulties, pains, absences, adversities and vicissitudes.
These elements won’t suffice to imagine what Selznick has created:
Wonderstruck is a real artwork!
This book blends the language of images and words by alternating the storytelling of the two stories.
With his pencil Selznick creates Rose, a deaf-mute girl who wants to go to New York to join her mother.
With the fantastic charcoal, zoom and chiaroscuro technique, the author totally involves the reader.
Rose is deaf and it is as if we are too; yet we are able to see, touch and feel what she is feeling.
In fact the author doesn’t grieve for her hearing loss, instead he makes it a point of contact with Ben.
Ben is the protagonist of the words.
Orphaned by his mother, lives with his aunt and uncle and after an unpleasant accident he loses his already precarious hearing.
While he is snooping about objects belonging to his mother in the infancy house, Ben discovers the existence of Daniel, his father.
His research starts with a book titled Wonderstruck, in which he discovers Daniel’s dedication to her mother Elaine.
Selznick leads the reader to wonder through the image and the word that, with the proceeding of the narration, become each other completion.
Will Ben and Rose finally meet? I leave you to find that out.
Wonderstruck is more than a book.
It is a sensory experience: the texture of paper, its smell, the colors of the cover, the black and white charcoal illustrations and the words imprinted on the pages.
This novel will easily gain a place of honor in your Wonderstruck:
Anyone who collects objects in the intimacy of the home wall is a curator. The mere fact of choosing how to expose your things, deciding which paintings to show and where, and what order to give books, puts you in the same category as a museum curator.
Reading time
a couple of happy hours
in Wonderstruck
Ph. Sara Cartelli
© The Eat Culture
Author
Bio:
She is an art historian, optimistic and empathic by nature. She imagines a world where sow kindness enjoying the little things. She's in love with stories since she was a child, for the Eat Culture she eats books and arts. Per aspera ad astra says the only tattoo on her skin. It reminds her that the road that leads to her dreams is not always easy but that she never gives up.
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