The Ondt and The Gracehoper
Thomas McNally [Illustrations] and James Joyce [Words]
[Lilliput Press]
With The Ondt and The Gracehoper, Mr. James Joyce provides the words: Aesop’s fable retold, in which the grasshopper’s idling is seen to contain a “grace” and a “hope” for us all. Mr. Danis Rose, a Joyce scholar who’s been asleep at the Wake for longer than many of our reviewers have lived, provides the intro. Mr. Thomas MacNally does the drawings – spiky, trippy, beautiful – and offers a lengthy afterword set of essays dropping names like Bergson, Kandinsky and Wyndham Lewis, whose style the visuals evoke and on whom the Ondtis based. It’s clear Mr. Joyce identifies with the hoper for grace. Even if said hoper winds up impoverished in the snow, like the vendor of songs at the end of Schubert’s Winterreise cycle, while the Ondt gets the girls, the gaff and the goods – the Gracehoper has the final line. Joyce deftly implies that the Ondt can’t beat time, though he may thrive in this place of space. Which it all comes down to: Space and time – who’ll win? If win is the word or winning’s your thing. Even a clown can try change the world by slowing her down.
It’s said that playing Mozart to cows will help them produce more milk and so too if a parent were to read this to their children, then they may well write books of their own one day. For a picture book it is, and a recipe for dreams: like Sendak stoned. Nice but nasty, funny and frightening, scary but sweet, all applied; a true goldmine. It makes one aware that Santa Claus is only a world of a letter away from the Satan Klaus (Kinski) Clause. Though this was disputed by one among the barfly ants with whom this reviewer discussed the matter, declaring he saw nothing in the pages he skimmed, the soberer gracehoper on my chair’s other side smilingly disagreed, saying that appreciation of an artwork was all that mattered. Warmly recommended.
Words: Sam Coll
