![]() ![]() It is also a pleasure to read this book aloud. Not its original purpose but on the horizon just the same. I would not be the least bit surprised if Sunday school classes started using it as a religious parable for death. Interestingly it almost works on a religious level. Remove the threat and what you're left with is something that exists alongside you. The takeaway, rather, is that it is a benign force. We don't quite understand its motivations. In Laszlo's own experience, the dark only seeks to help. When we look up at the night sky, it is looking back at us. The dark, in Snicket's universe, acts almost as an attentive guardian. He doesn't delve into the monsters or other beasties that may lurk in its corners. Snicket does not address a fear of the absence of light by offering up the usual platitudes. In practice, it’s more complicated than that. ![]() ![]() It has, on paper anyway, a purpose: address children’s fear of the dark. Besides, how can you not love a book that contains the following tags on its record: "cake, depression, friendship, haberdashery, happiness"? Take all that under consideration and The Dark is without a doubt the most normal picture book the man has attempted yet. I say that, but 16 copies of the book are currently checked out of my own library system. Then there was 13 Words which played out like a bit of experimental theater for the picture book set. Past efforts have included The Composer Is Dead which effectively replaced ye olde stand-by Peter and the Wolf in terms of instrument instruction in many a fine school district. When he writes a picture book he doesn’t go about it the usual route. There is nothing normal about Lemony Snicket. Something that helps Laszlo just when he needs it. Something in the bottom drawer of an old dresser. It comes into Laszlo’s room and though he has a flashlight, it seems to be everywhere. Then, one night, the dark does something unprecedented. Generally speaking it lives in the basement, and every morning Laszlo would open the door and say, “Hi. Seems as though the dark is everywhere you look sometimes. “You might be afraid of the dark, but the dark is not afraid of you.” Laszlo is afraid but there’s not much he can do about it. You’ll ne’er see the like again (unless they do another picture book together, in which case, scratch that). ![]() Behold the pairing of Lemony Snicket and Jon Klassen. It takes a certain kind of writer and a certain kind of illustrator to grasp this fear by the throat and throttle it good and sound. Picture books love to tackle a fear of monsters, but the idea of handling something as ephemeral as a fear of the dark is much much harder. That said, there are surprisingly few picture books out there that tackle this very specific fear. The dark is where you cannot see and what you cannot see cannot possibly do you any good. In the light of those others, a healthy fear of the dark makes perfect sense. Rogers claimed, though I’ve never met a kid that went that route), etc. So we get fears of dogs, the color mauve, certain dead-eyed paintings, fruit, and water going down the drain (or so Mr. Most childhood fears tap into the weird id (see, here I go) part of our brains where the unknown takes on greater and grander evils than could possibly occur in the real world. The whole reason I was going to do it at all is that after reading a book like Lemony Snicket’s The Dark I find myself wondering about kids and their fears. You have my full permission to slap me upside the head if I start off my children’s books reviews with something that bigheaded. The other involves the tension of the visionary, the yearning for "light" and the belief in it which occasionally distinguishes the people of genuine religious feelings facing the material interests of the majority.You do not know the temptation I am fighting right now to begin this review with some grandiose statement equating a fear of the dark with a fear of death itself. One is the social relationship, a mixture of free and forced situations, which arestablished between a strong individuality whose reasoning and frustration conflict with the reasoning and passion of the community. Two aspects are set down as intentionally dominant within the plan of Buero Vallejo's work. Accordingly, the play must be understood as a sketch of the tragedy of man and his destiny, a problem which again is acquiring legitimacy and urgency, outstepping from the serious Spanish theatre studies into the surrounding reality. In the author's own words his play "aims to set down within a realistic framework, so necessary to the theatre, a nucleus of problems and passions involving man in general, and not blind people in particular." The physical blindness of the depicted characters is only a motive or pretext for presenting the limitations we all share as human beings. ![]()
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