Where The Wild Things Are: A Retelling

Yesterday I introduced grandson Brendan, age 3, to Maurice Sendak's famous picture book Where the Wild Things Are. He requested four repeats, so it was fresh on my mind when I picked up The New Yorker a few hours later and found a story by Dave Eggers called "Max at Sea." It didn't take long to realize that Eggers was retelling, with much embellishment, Sendak's story of Max, the boy in the wolf costume who acts up, gets sent to bed without supper, and sails to a fantasy island of strange monsters. In the new version, Max joins the monsters in destroying their own nests, a crime I thought bizarre (as did Max) until I thought of how easily a child can wreck his own home. Max wins the monster's approval and is made their king. "Let the wild rumpus begin!" he proclaims, as in the original--and the story is over.

The best part of Sendak's story for me is Max's return to his bedroom, where he finds that dinner has been left for him, and it's still warm. I guess for Eggers it's all about the rumpus. I'm not sure that readers unfamiliar with the story will get much from "Max at Sea," but if you love the original, you will probably enjoy Eggers' riff on it.

Later...turns out Eggers wrote the screenplay for the upcoming movie. And that the story in The New Yorker is part of a larger novel. Go here for an interview with Eggers about all these wild things. A link to the story is at the start of the interview.

Hold on to your Slippers

Cutting for Stone
a novel by Abraham Verghese

In a 1950s Ethiopian mission hospital prophetically called Missing, conjoined twin boys survive a traumatic surprise birth. Their mother, a beautiful Indian nun who never revealed her pregnancy, dies, and Thomas Stone, the attending surgeon assumed to be the father, flees. The babies are separated but retain a bond so strong that narrator Marion often refers to them as one person: ShivaMarion.

Adopted by doctors Ghosh and Hema, who find their own love through the boys and return it generously, the twins grow up steeped in medical knowledge and practice, often to humorous effect: "Hema’s departures in the night [to deliver babies]came with cryptic phrases...: `eclampsia' or `postpartum hemorrhage' or, that most chilling term of all, the `Delayed Afterbird.' That one wasn’t even in the medical dictionary. And you never heard of the Afterbird except when it was Delayed. It was feared, and yet its arrival was necessary. Shiva and I looked for that Delayed Afterbird on the trees of Missing, or high up in the sky." Shades of Garp's Undertoad.

Two Sweet Movies

I usually limit myself to book talk here, but the last two movies I've seen were so wonderful that I have to gush about them. "Away We Go" was written by fave author Dave Eggers (A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius) and Vendela Vida, who I believe is his wife. John Krasinski, the lovable bear of The Office, and Maya Rudolph of SNL play a young couple facing the need to define themselves as they await their first child. Giddily devoted to each other, they leave their trailer home to sample life in other locales where friends live. In Phoenix Allison Janney gives a hilarious lesson in how not to parent, a performance later topped by Maggie Gyllenhaal's anti-stroller ("Why would I want to push my children AWAY from me?") uber-mama in Madison, Wisconsin. In Montreal they witness the sadness of friends who adopt children to try to make up for their lost pregnancies. Burt and Varona leave each city with more questions and no answers, but they never lose faith in themselves or their future. Underlying the movie is Eggers' trademark zest for life while death hovers just offstage. Ray and I both gave it an A+.

(500) Days of Summer is another sweet love story with terrific actors and a whimsical, creative visual style. Serious, angsty Tom (Joseph Levitt-Gordon) and enchanting vagabond Summer (Zooey Deschanel) fall in love, and we get to go along for the ride. We know from the start that the affair won't last, but it's still a pleasure to jump on and off their ride (revealed in unchronological order), from Tom's first giddy fall to Summer's ultimate revelation and a nice little coda that will enable you to walk out smiling. I'll see this one again.

I've GOT to Get Rid of Some Books!

I have a faux rule that for every book I buy I have to get rid of one already in the house. It's SO faux that I've never once followed it, and now there is absolutely no place to put the new books I continue to bring home. Reading on my Kindle has slowed the rate of space-hogging acquisitions, but I MUST own IN HARDBACK the new novels of Russo and Conroy, which will simply not fit on the tottering read-next stack of 3-for-2 paperbacks or in the special family bookcase of books-that-changed-our-lives or on the shelves of I-really-will-get-around-to-these-one-day virgins. Buried somewhere among the possible losers is the next story that will transport me to that reading nirvana where I actually can't go to sleep and will also move me to greater insight about another culture or the entire human race. Every book unread carries this potential, and every book already read and loved is like a snapshot of a moment in the past I can't part with.

So how am I going to downsize my library? Do I get rid of The Oxford Guide to the English Language that I haven't looked at since I retired from the classroom? How about the seven-volume set of The Williamsburg Novels, which I loved in adolescence but found I had outgrown when I tried them again last year? The coffee-table size books about Pittsburgh, our home town? The many volumes about birds, though we haven't gone birding or looked at the books in several years? The many books about how to write and how to get published? (There are so many--how can my novels still be in the closet?!) The poetry books, which are quite dusty, I'm ashamed to say? The novels I taught (and therefore read enough times to have memorized whole chapters), marred by annotations and highlighted passages I didn't want my skimming students to miss? The promo copies of children's books my grandson hasn't grown into yet?

They're all too precious. I'll just have to get rid of some furniture and build another bookshelf.