Incandescent picture book ‘My Father’s Arms Are A Boat’ from Norway

by Sam Juliano

There is something about the Scandinavian sensibility that seems to infuse their artistic output with a pervading sense of melancholy and darker themes.  It is easy to understand when one considers the shorter days, colder climate and generally more austere and cerebral mind set (cliches to a degree, but this has always been the perception) and the tendency for their arts to reflect a more pensive and philosophical mood.  One may immediately think of the brooding death-obsessed master filmmaker Ingmar Bergman, the playwright extraordinaire August Strindberg, who explored naturalistic tragedy, the iconic painter Edvard Munch, whose masterpiece The Scream, is a prime example of evocative treatment of psychological themes.  Carl Theodor Dreyer, whose  Vampyr, The Passion of Joan of Arc and Day of Wrath rank among the greatest of all films was another who examined state of mind in harrowing terms, and a long string of contemporary filmmakers like Thomas Vinterberg have relentlessly examined family strife and depression.  In music there has always been a melancholic undercurrent in the nature-infused work of Jean Sibelius and Edvard Grieg.

Stein Erik Lunde and Oyvind Torseter’s sublime and incandescent picture book My Father’s Arms Are A Boat was recently named as a Batchelder honor book by the American Library Association in the one category that awards foreign language achievement, providing that it has been translated.  The translation for My Father’s Arms Are A Boat is by Kari Dickson, and it is extraordinarily effective and deeply-felt.  Starkly set during the dead of winter in and around an unforgiving country house lived in by a father and young son (“My window is pitch black.  I have socks on, and a wooly sweater under my pajamas.  I can’t sleep.  It’s quieter now than it’s ever been.”) the story is poetically and suggestively told with a great deal of shivery emotion:

I go back into the living room.

My dad looks at me, and I climb onto his lap.

He puts both his arms tight under my knees.

My body is curled up like a ball.

I rest my head against his shoulder.

An inquisitive exchange follows when the unnamed young boy inquires about the red birds that hang around and the fox that can be seen patrolling the grounds.  But the boy reveals that there is more meaning behind the seemingly innocuous habits of these domestic creatures:

The red birds fly silently through the air.

They sit on the white stone and watch me with one eye.

Then they pick up pieces of bread in their beaks and

fly away to hide it somewhere high up in a tree.

Then they come back again.

They fly back and forth, until there is no bread left on the stone.

Granny says the red birds are dead people.

And then the saddest truth of all, the scar that brings the emotional depth of this story full circle:

“Is Mommy asleep?” I ask.

“Mommy’s asleep,” says Daddy.

“She’ll never wake up again?” I ask.

“No, not where she is now.

Should we go out and look at the stars?”

     There is an intimacy and sense of immediacy to Lunde’s expressive prose that achieve remarkable integration with Torseter’s dream-like media collage illustrations that bring an ethereal quality to the aching reality of this powerful take of loneliness and healing and the trials and tribulations of coming to terms with loss.  Muted colors help to bring visual identification to the book’s themes, as does the effective employment of minimal motifs like pencil sketches and the blurred details of a dream.  Dotting the drab but breathtaking visual scheme are the red birds and the orange fox, which serve as emphatic, fleeting images envisioned during the acute stages of grief.

The title’s significance is revealed in a metaphorical passage:

I look up at the stars.

I look at the moon that looks like a boat.

My dad’s arms are like a boat, too.

One that sails me out into the middle of the yard.

The boat stops.

The stars are so far away and yet so close.

The final spread offers hope and acceptance with budding color as the spring season approaches.  The collage work in My Father’s Arms Are A Boat is purposely made to look three-dimensional to increase the life like quality of the characters and their environment.  Torseter is one of Norway’s most acclaimed illustrators and has won the highest prizes his country has ever handed down.  In addition to this unforgettable collaboration with Lunde, he worked solo on his astoundingly creative wordless book The Hole, which will also be covered in the present series.  Lunde is a major writer in Norway and has been published in many European countries.  This is his first to be published in the United States.  He has written lyrics for over a hundred songs and has translated Bob Dylan into Norwegian.  It is hard to imagine that an author’s beautiful prose could be better matched with magnificent illustrations as it is here in this remarkable collaboration.  My Father’s Arms Are A Boat, haunting and unforgettable, forges a path to the human heart.

 

Enchanted Lion Books        34 pp.           $15.95

Note: This is the third entry in a continuing series that will examine non-American picture books of a high level of artistry and creativity that were released during 2013.  The series will also include a few special items and recent releases.