The following is a beautiful review of a touching picturebook by John Burningham that deals with life, love and death.
Granpa has been recognised as ‘the supreme example of a postmodern picturebook’, one that Victor Watson found evokes ‘an unusually complex and attentive response’ in young readers. It offers none of the supports an inexperienced reader could seize on: instead we find repetitions and refrains, pantomimic action, jokes and surprises, and phonic word patterning. (…)
The story is about an old man’s past and a little girl’s present. The unnamed child is part of a continuity that reveals itself in fragments and opens out backwards, the final picture suggesting that past and future are capable of some kind of magical – or conceptual – convergence. Granpa passes on to his grandchild seminal cultural scraps that become part of her complex and often ambiguous learning: about playing in summer back gardens, about the past, about the strange cultural practices associated with a day at the seaside, about sexual embarrassment and that adults can be hurt. Above all, she learns about love.
Each two-page spread captures one particular moment in time in the relationship between the little girl and her grandfather. It is as if the picturebook is an album showing discrete and separate moments of the two, caught unaware of the camera. The settings and actions shift suddenly without transitions.
(…) when we turn the page we find a different kind of opening, full of puzzling disconnectedness. We see immediately that the verbal text has two parallel stories, both in direct speech. Granpa’s speech is printed in ordinary typeface, the child’s in italics. (…)
“The final double spread is an intensification of the earlier illustrations – ‘but intensification through reduction’. This opening illustrates absence. (…)
His chair is ‘eloquently empty’.
Filed under: Linguistics, Translation
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