Last week I told you about one of my favourite picturebooks, Duck, Death and the Tulip by Wolf Erlbruch (2008) (I also love his Fearsome Five (2009) ). I thought I would put some images from it up on here so you could see, perhaps, why it was in my mind when we were discussing Markus Zusak's The Boof Thief beyond the shared preoccupation with absence, silences and death that I mentioned. Both share an interest in multiplicity of coding, that is, that we think in both language and pictures, and our thoughts follow an eclectic thought process, leaping between codes. They both present us with relationships between text and image as a way of making sense of a reality. Death is personified and the story shifts between focalizers, one moment we feel as if we are the duck, another death. I like the way Death observes, and carries away the duck, he has a very physical presence. I see these things and feel a shared tone in The Book Thief. I just think it's a beautiful picturebook...
:)
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