Books at Bedtime: the books of Jorge Luján
Tuesday, September 29th, 2009
Prompted by my reading of exiled Argentinian children’s writer, Jorge Lujàn’s Personal View in the recent issue of PaperTigers, I went to my library to take out his books. I found three: Sky Blue Accident/ Accidente Celeste, Rooster Gallo and Colors ¡Colores! (all published by Groundwood Books).
In reading them to my daughter, I was immediately enchanted. The stories were palpably poetic. In Sky Blue Accident, for example, a boy crashes into the sky and puts the broken pieces into his pocket. In Rooster, when the rooster opens its beak, the sun comes up, opens its hand and gives birth to the day. In Colors, night has a black gown in which stars — the ‘eyes of the universe can shine more brightly.’ Some of you may recognize at once the magical realist quality of these stories for which Latin American writers are particularly renowned. Personifying colors and natural elements like the sky and the day without being stereotypical takes a special creative knack and Lujàn has tha
t knack in spades, so to speak. And of course, such creative and perceptive views of the world are an illustrator’s delight. These books have different illustrators with their own unique style. Sky Blue Accident and Colors are illustrated by Piet Grobler whose style is captivatingly quirky as in Sky Blue Accident or breezily ephemeral as in the watercolor swathes found in Colors. Rooster is illustrated by Manuel Monroy. The bird is painted a speckled blue; it’s body is a metaphor for the sky. I liked how the speckles flew off as stars at one point in the book, and how the rooster eats a star with a star gleaming in its eye on the next page.
Lujàn’s books are bilingual in Spanish and English. Although I’m not particularly familiar with Spanish, I enjoyed reading the Spanish text aloud to my daughter. We learned Spanish words a la Lujàn in a totally new and delightful way!
