Culture. Eat it
22 February 2016
We are in 1874, the most chilly night of the year hanging over Edinburgh.
In the house on the hill Madeleine the “witch” gives birth to little Jack: his heart is frozen and the only way to save him is to replace the organ with a cuckoo clock, its mechanism will allow him to beat. He’ll find soon that this trick will force him to a life away from the feelings, including love, but Jack can’t fear what is unknown.
However one day the voice of a young singer – Miss Acacia – enters strongly in his strange heart arousing the fear and the concern of Madeleine, her mother-midwife, who will warn him with these words:
One, don’t touch the hands.
Two, dominates the anger.
Three, never fall in love, never ever.
Otherwise, in the clock of your heart, the big hand
of the hours will pierce your skin forever,
your bones will shatter,
and the mechanics of the heart will go again into pieces.
The boy with the cuckoo-clock heart isn’t a children’s novel but Mathias Malzieu, with his charming style enchant as if it were so. He speaks to adults for whom it’s still possible imagine a cuckoo clock as heart, to adults still able to be carried away by the love between the little more than teenagers protagonists – also if they think as adults.
The key word of the story of little Jack is certainly trust:
given to Madeleine, who loves him like a mother can do;
boundless in the love for the little singer, for her he overcomes his fragile condition traveling around Europe in order to find her again;
donated to the life he want for himselfs, tempting the fate to which others think he’s destined.
Time of the reading: a couple of nights
Photography: 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.
You may also like
the book on the nightstand
Vincent Van Love. A story in pictures of Vincent’s inner world
by Ramona Lucarelli
