Procrastadabbler

Last week I learned about the book, The Invention of Hugo Cabret, by Brian Selznick from an article in the local paper by Jack Garner. I was intrigued, bought the book, and just read it.

The book is an homage to the early movies, it is the story of a child’s perseverance, a story of hope, and from a literacy perspective it is a fascinating hybrid of photos, still shots from movies, original art, and typographic text. The photos and still shots supplement the text, but the original art move the story along. They are an integral part of the story. The reader must know how to read the pictures as well as the typographic text. There is also a great deal of intertextuality at play within this novel and the reader must know the grammar of movies as well as the grammar of a story in order to make sense of it. How to move through images and make connections between images. How to integrate text and image. What is being referred to within an image. I’m sure there are many I did not get in that I don’t know much about old movies.

The shame is that this book is being marketed as a children’s book. I couldn’t find it at B&N and had to ask for it. It was buried in the children’s section. It should be there. What a glorious way to introduce children to the history of film and of Paris. But it also belongs in the film section. And maybe somewhere else too. I don’t know how these decisions are made, but this book isn’t being given the placement it deserves.

The book is, if I can used a hackneyed phrase, magical. If we must label, I would call this book a postmodern novel for the postmodern adult. It resists categorization as a novel, and the postmodern adult resists categorization as an adult. On the surface it’s a children’s story, but on so many other levels it is so much more.