Word: juvenilia
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...jungle also occupies William Steig, who, at 80, has found the source of eternal juvenilia. The proof is in his 21st children's book, The Zabajaba Jungle (Farrar, Straus & Giroux; $13.95). The author-illustrator enters the imagination of Leonard, a small rover who cuts his way through underbrush populated with beaky toucans and blue-bottomed mandrills. After a series of hilarious escapades, the boy encounters the most unexpected creatures of all: his mother and father. They look relieved to see him, and why not? What are young explorers for except to rescue grownups...
These intertwined circumstances make The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor something more than another raid on a successful author's juvenilia. For Garcia Marquez, who would become world famous through his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, this early effort in journalism provided a lesson in the bizarre effects that telling a tale can have on characters and author alike. His attempt to reconstruct Velasco's experiences as factually as possible assumed a life of its own; the sailor who braved exposure and sharks fell afoul of the words of his story. And words, paradoxically, rescued Velasco's adventure from...
...juvenilia are missing; the show contains nothing earlier than 1961, so that one does not see the transition between the "commercial" artist Thiebaud was--doing cartoons, Rexall ads and Hollywood publicity sets in the 1940s--and the "fine" one he is. Still, this is the fullest look one has yet had at this quintessential California painter. The show will travel to other museums in California and the Midwest, finishing in Kansas City in the fall of 1986. It will not be seen on the East Coast, presumably because it lacks the factitious glamour that might commend it to such institutions...
...Abstinence Department of the Anti-Saloon League." It pledges abstinence, saying further that intoxicating beverages are "productive of pauperism, degradation and crime.") Faded photographs are particularly difficult to reject (this one has them roller-skating in Central Park during the Depression), as are imperfect potteries, one's own juvenilia. Each visit becomes a sort of "This Was Our Life" program, and not uncomfortably so. Afterward, the wires sing between siblings...
...school of German Romanticism. The sprung rhythms of the text and the richly allusive paintings do not make Outside Over There inappropriate for children. Even the very young can appreciate the work on its outer level. But only adults can wholly understand a work that has been merchandized as juvenilia and is, instead, the most unusual novel of the season...