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Narrated by LibriVox Community
Lewis Carroll— 29 minutes
Narrated by LibriVox Community
Lewis Carroll— 29 minutes
With the release of this gorgeous facsimile edition, readers today can experience the poem just as Victorian readers did. This story of a chaotic quest is a delight in any format, but here, bound in a vivid red-and-gold cover, the poem isn’t the only work of art, the book is too.
A fabulous poem—hilarity and wit,
a balance of pleasure and peril,
was writ by none other, in piqué or in fit,
than the beloved Lewis Carroll.
A reproduction more lovingly made
has doubtful ever been seen.
Imprinted with gold of the highest grade,
Most households will need seventeen.
"Delightfully surreal...save this book for the brightest and most adventurous young word-worms on your holiday shopping list...Singh's daring illustrations will appeal to older children eager to leave the world of candy-colored cuteness behind."
—New Yorker
"At last, the legend of the brave, if peculiar, companions who set out to bag a snark (arming themselves "with forks and with hope") gets lavish treatment from [Mahendra] Singh....These may be the fittest illustrations ever created for Carroll's distinctively Victorian nonsense concoctions."
—Laura Miller, Salon
"[C]hallenging and delightful."
—Marilyn Dahl, Shelf Awareness
"It is not children who ought to read the words of Lewis Carroll."
—G.K. Chesterton
"Singh's black-and-white surrealistic treatment of Carroll's classic poem is perfect...takes the ideology of Carroll's nonsense to new visual levels. Far beyond a simplistic, literal depiction of the poem, each panel is thoughtfully created, filled with puzzles, jokes, and allusions."
—Library Journal
| BN ID: | 2940169421682 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | LibriVox |
| Publication date: | 08/25/2014 |
From the Foreword
There exists a certain kind of mind that is uncomfortable with ambiguity, nonsense, and the creative imagination. Such persons attempt to reduce the abstruse to some prosaic explication, which they then often insist is the only way to look at it, and surely was the original intent of the author, whose mind they know better than he or she did. This has frequently been the fate of the Snark and, for that matter, Carroll's two masterful Alice books, for those of limited intelligence (intellect, which such persons might possess in abundance, is another matter entirely) who 'read' the poem in their own idiosyncratic way. (Analogously, we in the States elected a man as our leader who sees things exactly as he wishes to see them and allows no such things as facts or truth to stand in his way.)
Contrariwise, as Tweedledee would say, more enlightened minds can rejoice in profound and perplexing-another term might be 'poetic'-works of art. Hermeneutics (the art of interpretation) can better be used to demonstrate how a text could be construed a certain way, thereby proving, with great humor and wisdom, just how infinite is its depth. Fortunately, we are in such hands with this present edition, which does not dictate but rather wittily utilizes illustrations to the poem to memorialize a moment in political time, the bewildering administration of Donald J. Trump and his cronies, by assigning caricatures of his staff to the expedition's crew.
As Ben Hecht put it in A Guide for the Bedevilled (1945), 'Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock.' Already at this writing some of the persons caricatured in this edition have left the administration-Anthony Scaramucci, Reince Priebus, and Stephen K. Bannon-but that does not affect George Walker's superb caricatures, nor this edition serving as an aide-mémoire of a baffling yet historic time.
-Mark Burstein, President Emeritus of the Lewis Carroll Society of North America
