Where the Wild Things Are

tWhat's the moral of this story? Some might say Sendack's work is a testament to the unbridled powers of a child's imagination. Others would posit that the true virtue of Where the Wild Things Are stems from the reversal of a timeless power dynamic in which monsters frighten children. In Sendack's carefully rendered world, monsters submit to the whims of children, which appears to suit Max well enough. I assume it works well for other children as well. If you can't convince snot-nosed brats that monsters don't exist, at least you can convince them that monsters are friendly. Children, after all, are like neo-conservatives. You can only reason with them on their own delusional terms.

tHere's the summary:
t
tMax is an asshole. His mother calls him a monster, so he flies into a cannibalistic rage. She sends him to his room without dinner, which doesn't seem to be the best of ideas since he just threatened to eat her f*&% face off, but whatever. This book isn't heralded as a classic because of its promotion of high-quality parenting techniques. I'll get to that in a moment.

tI couldn't help but notice the parallels between the story of Max and the early years of Siddhartha. Both starve themselves until they hallucinate. But the similarities end there. Siddhartha realizes that his approach to transcendentalism is misguided, and he eats once more. Max, on the other hand, starves himself for a night and trees grow in his room. Then he proceeds to get on a boat and fast for an entire year, at which point he starts seeing giant monsters.

tThe fact that these monsters cater to his delusions of grandeur--cowering in his presence and sharing his flesh-eating inclinations--lets us know that Max has externalized his fantasy world through strict fasting. On one hand, I respect this kid. I can rarely push through four days without wheat before the weekend starts and I pack in 80lbs of corporate-grown meat and bleached bread. On the other hand, what the hell is this book teaching our children? I'll tell you.



That middle finger means "I was raised on Sendak!"


tAside from self-imposed starvation, the book teaches children to give up on their aspirations as soon as the slightest temptation arises: "he smelled good things to eat so he gave up being king." It sends the message that those who love you would just as happily rip your entrails out and feast upon them as soon as you decide to leave: "Oh please don't go-we'll eat you up-we love you so!" And, finally, it shows them that parents' threats are temporally limited, and eventually love will cause them to cave in. At the end of the story, Max returns to his room "where he found his supper waiting for him." Way to be strong, mom. Pushover.
t
I bet Satan loves this book.

4.5

I can still remember reading this for the first time in my grade school library. The pictures and illustrations can be a little scary at times, but they still remain incredible to me. I love children's books that are adventurous and take you places. This is one of them.

5*****

It's hard to believe I never read this book as a child, but it's true. I'm glad to read it as an adult, when I can fully appreciate Sendak's artwork and subtle humor. This is a children's book that truly deserves every accolade and award showered upon it. It has a home in our permanent library now, for any child that comes along to enjoy.

"The night Max wore his wolf suit and made mischief of one kind..." These are probably the best 13 opening words ever written in the history of picture books.

Sendak is a master of brevity, telling poignant stories in less words than most of us use to talk about the weather. His approach to children's literature is honest and non condescending. He remembers what is was like to be a child, and through his storytelling reminds the rest of us how our perception of the world was when we were young; dark and hopeful, mysterious and tangible, innocent and knowing, fearful and confident.

This book is pure magic.

I lived in Richmond,Kentucky when I was a kid. It was a sweet, semi-rural upbringing where a six year old could walk up the street with his little poodle dog (that would be me and mine) and visit a kindly elderly couple that would only allow the dog on their couch when the dog had just been washed. Somehow the dog knew this and was always ready to take that walk up the street after it had been bathed. Weird, I know. It was also the kind of small town where people who read the New Yorker were few and far between, but this kindly elderly couple (The Ortenbergers) had not only a subscription to the magazine, but also a book filled with the cartoon, which were way too sophisticated for a six year old boy, but the boy would still gravitate towards that book every time he visited and try to figure out what made it funny that an old man sitting on a park bench would say "The pigeons really like you" to a skeleton that was seated next to him and was covered in pigeons.
Perhaps it was out of pity that this elderly couple gave that young boy a copy of "Where the Wild Things Are." Not that the young boy was wont for books. But this kindly, elderly couple sensed his need for some literature of his reading and intellect available to him now. They were right, and it has turned out to be a book the young boy would treasure into his adulthood. A book that he would, in turn, gift to other young literates because he recognized not just the beauty and quality of the illustrations, but the elegant simplicity of the childhood fantasy.

My son and I love this book! So much so that our poor little copy is falling apart and we need a new one.

3.5 Stars

Small fry was utterly enchanted, and I think we both loved Max’s unbridled excitement. The whole story reads like a love-letter to childish imagination.

But Max was also a mean little snoot who threatened to eat his mother and was a little tyrant to the Wild Things... jussaying

Kid Lit Experiment 2018 #7

This is the story of Max’s adventures when he sails away to the land where the Wild Things are. Written and illustrated by Maurice Sendak, this children’s picture book has become an acknowledged classic. A winner of the Caldecott Medal for the Most Distinguished Picture Book of the Year in 1964, Where the Wild Things Are is a timeless masterpiece that can be enjoyed equally by children and grown-ups. I love it, and needless to say I stopped being a child long, long ago.

Where the Wild Things changed children’s books forever. The illustrations are dreamlike, the writing style simple, yet imaginative and delightfully atypical. One evening Max, mischievous as always, tells his mother that he's going to eat her up. His mother, understandably at her wits' end, sends him to bed without any supper. From here, Max sets sails, navigating his private boat across the sea of his imagination to a land of truly wild things: huge monsters with claws and fangs and fierce yellow eyes. Undaunted, Max tames them and quickly becomes their king.

and he sailed off through night and day
and in and out of weeks
and almost over a year
to where the wild things are

Eventually, though, in spite of the power he wields and the joy of the “wild rumpus,” Max heeds the call of home. It’s the smell of the good things to eat that calls him back the strongest, and climbing in his boat, Max sails back across the world to his own bedroom, where, his supper waits for him while still hot.

Yeah, I never really did get all the hype on this one. Even as a child I didn't really like it, and now as an adult I read it and think, "Is this supposed to make it seem okay to be a little tyrant?" I would hope that most kids would see what a brat the kid is, and strive not to be such a horrible little turd, but with the prospect of going to a cool magical new land? I don't know, I may have tried it out just to see. Kind of like when I didn't tell my parents I lost a tooth, just to make sure the tooth fairy really wasn't real.

A Perfect Picture Book

I’ve been teaching Where the Wild Things Are (1963) here at Fukuoka University for over twenty-five years now, and almost every time I learn something new about how it works and enjoy it again.



Maurice Sendak had some false starts making his classic book, one in 1958 called Where the Wild Horses Are, a book about an inch in height with wide pages, and then one in 1963 with the final title but fashioned too small (about the size of his Nutshell Library). And then when he’d found just the right size and title of the eventual book, he had to de-clutter the words (the text being overwritten) and pictures (the initial pictures having too many objects and details). Anyway, he did finally make a perfect picture book.

In the compact and potent story Max is wearing his “wolf suit” pajamas and going violently crazy at home (torturing his stuffed animal bear, hammering a nail in the wall to hang a string to make a blanket lair, chasing his dog down the stairs with a large fork, threatening to eat his mother up, etc.), so his mother calls him, “WILD THING!” and sends him to bed without supper, whereupon his bedroom changes into a forest and an ocean, and he sails off in a boat to Where the Wild Things Are, where he tames the monsters and becomes their king and plays with them, until he finally is sated and realizes he misses someone who loved him most of all and returns to his bedroom to find his supper waiting for him.









To tell that story, the pictures and words do interesting things, separately and together.

Sometimes the words add details absent from the pictures, like Max’ mother, whom Sendak never draws. One sentence goes on for about eight pages! But he uses “and” skillfully and ends each page at a pause-able point so as to make it easy and fun to read the book aloud. There’s even a neat touch whereby he puts the time words when Max travels to Where the Wild Things Are in an order increasing from small to large (night, day, weeks, year) only to reverse them (year, weeks, day, night) when his hero returns home, giving the impression of time travel (though then how is one to explain the full moon in his bedroom window at the end of the story when it began with a crescent moon?).

Sometimes the pictures add details absent from the words, like the nature of Max’ mischief, the picture on the wall of a wild thing that Max has drawn, the presence of the moon throughout, the way the moon changes size to match Max’ changing moods, the items in his supper, the diverse and chimerical composition of the wild things, and so on. Sometimes the illustrations provide a pleasing balance or symmetry, as when Max and the wild thing with human feet are sitting like mirror images in the same pose. Sendak’s extensive cross-hatching makes the pictures solid and substantial but also dreamlike and nocturnal.



Sometimes the words and pictures work together, as when Max is “lonely,” and the picture shows his melancholy face. Sometimes the words and pictures work against each other, as when “mischief” seems an understatement for the mayhem Max is unleashing, and when “terrible” repeatedly describes the wild things, but they look more silly or cute or ugly.

Sendak also cleverly uses layout, as in the way the pictures at first appear on the right hand pages with big white margins around them, while the words at first appear on the left hand pages, but as Max’ wildness grows, the pictures grow across the pages as the words and margins retreat, until in the wild rumpus climax there are three consecutive wonderful wordless two-page spreads where the pictures go from edge to edge (it is now that the moon is finally full, too). Then after Max expresses his wildness and fulfills and exhausts himself, the pictures start retreating as the words start advancing, till the last page has no image at all but only the words, “and it was still hot.” A wonderful touch to represent the degree of Max’s wildness by the presence or absence of words (more civilized) and pictures (more primitive).

It must be so fun for kids to read a story in which the little boy hero goes wild at home, escapes punishment by journeying to his ideal wild play place, takes command of giants like grotesque adults, gives them the punishment his mother has given him by sending them to bed without their supper, then returns home to his own still hot supper comprised of soup, milk, and cake. (The themes on using fantasy to express one’s anger and resentment and frustration are great.) And although in the last picture he has pulled down his wolf suit head to reveal his good boy’s head, he is still wearing the wolf suit, and he can go wild again any time, and the moon is full, and the wild thing on the cover is waiting for him.



Finally, I’m impressed by Sendak’s emotional restraint in the book, which is unsentimental. Imagine if at the end, instead of the brilliant last blank white page bearing only the words, “and it was still hot,” Sendak had, for instance, forced on us a picture of Max and his mother hugging or of Max’s mother watching her son eating! (Contrast that with the ending of the 2009 movie.)

This year the book is sixty, but it never feels old.

Like a gremlin crouched in the back of a dim cave, Where the Wild Things Are lay on my cousin's bedroom floor. My cousin was in kindergarden and I was being babysat by my aunt, busy in the kitchen downstairs - might as well have been miles away. The bedroom shades were drawn, the house quiet, the room empty. That book with its-its things in it called to me. I'd never seen anything like it. My books had colorful, happy animals that didn't make me feel this way....what was this feeling? Was this what was known as fear? And what were those things? Were they, maybe, those things called monsters? I'd not fully experienced fear before, perhaps because I'd not put a face on it. I crept closer. Those faces looked mean, ferocious. I stopped in the middle of the room, neither advancing towards the book, nor fleeing. I was terrified...and I loved it!


Appendixed!: It's Maurice Sendak's birthday today. (Thanks Google!) If he hadn't died last year, he would be 85 now....85 crusty old years. Right around the time he died NPR was playing archival interviews of him. It was the first time I'd heard him speak. I could've done without the experience. I have nothing against his voice, rather the things that come out of his mouth. The man was curmudgeonly to the core it seems. I can be a bit of a pill myself sometimes, so I should cut him some slack, but I was surprised by his grouchiness. I suppose I always assume children's authors are bright, cheerful sorts. Heck, they write happy little stories about colorful, good-hearted characters that usually come out on top. How could such stuff come from a sourpuss? Well, Sendak was proof that it can. Hm. That's funny. I'm 40 and I'm still learning things from children's lit.