Salon.com > Where the Wild Things Are

Final Sendak book a tribute to his brother

Mon, 04 Feb 2013 14:12:00 +0000

NEW YORK (AP) -- The last completed book we are likely to get from Maurice Sendak remembers a man he often insisted was the real genius of the family, his brother Jack.

Sendak died last May at age 83 after years of health problems, but had managed to finish "My Brother's Book," published this week. Admirers of "Where the Wild Things Are" and other Sendak stories will recognize its themes of danger, flight and fantasy, captured in a dreamy-scary swirl that demonstrates Sendak's debt to William Blake.

Brothers Guy and Jack are blasted apart by a fiery star, Jack to "continents of ice" and Guy into the "lair of a bear" who attempts to choke Guy and devour him. Guy enrages the bear by asking him a riddle and is flung upon a "couch of flowers/in an ice-ribbed underworld." Inside a greenish curtain of blossoms, he spies the nose of Jack and bites it to make sure he has found him. "And Jack slept safe/Enfolded in his brother's arms/And Guy whispered `Good night/And you will dream of me.'"

Maurice Sendak’s endless rumpus

Tue, 08 May 2012 18:55:00 +0000

"Where the Wild Things Are" was published in 1963, just one year after I was born. This, I am sure, was no accident. I have always been up for a wild rumpus.

Which doesn't make me particularly special. The 1960s, as "Mad Men" takes pains to remind us with each new episode, was a decade-long wild rumpus. If you didn't seize every chance to ride piggy-back on half-menacing, half-jubilant dancing monsters you were ignoring the lesson of the age, something manifestly perceivable even to those of us who wouldn't hit puberty until the '70s. If it seems silly now that librarians used to draw diapers across the baby Max who starred in "In the Night Kitchen" -- well, we can blame some combination of Sendak and the '60s for our more refined modern sensibilities. As my mother, a neuroscientist, read "Where the Wild Things Are" to me, new synaptic connections spread like a grass fire in my brain. From Sendak to "Helter Skelter," in one easy swoop.

It was a lesson we never let go of. As Margalit Fox's superb New York Times obituary for Maurice Sendak notes, his "books were essential ingredients of childhood for the generation born after 1960 or thereabouts, and in turn for their children."

Where the wild things aren’t

Fri, 16 Oct 2009 07:07:00 +0000

There has been a great deal of chatter, on the Web and elsewhere, about the target audience for Spike Jonze's elaborate adaptation of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are," a book that has been loved to dog-eared tatters by many, many children since its publication in 1963. Is Jonze's movie for people who currently happen to be children, or for people who used to be children? And if it's chiefly for the latter -- as Jonze himself pretty much confirmed in a recent New York Times Magazine profile -- the next question might be, Is it OK for kids, or is it too scary?

If your kids get all wide-eyed at the prospect of listening to grown-ups' self-absorbed reflections on the fears, anxieties and frustrations of childhood, or if they've ever clambered onto your lap and begged for a civics lesson on the dangers of totalitarianism, then by all means run, don't walk, to Fandango and get your tickets for "Where the Wild Things Are."

Kids’ movies that aren’t for kids: The top 10

Thu, 15 Oct 2009 17:16:00 +0000

A still from "Spirited Away"

I haven't yet seen the Dave Eggers-Spike Jonze film adaptation of Maurice Sendak's "Where the Wild Things Are," which might be the most eagerly anticipated big movie of the fall season. But let's be honest about that anticipation: Part of it is an earnest desire to see Jonze's apparently gorgeous fantasy construction, and part of it is mystified wonder mixed with schadenfreude. How do you turn a beloved picture book for small children -- a book with almost no text, predicated on evoking an imaginative response -- into a Hollywood movie, the most literal-minded and imagination-supplanting of all art forms?

Now, first of all, Jonze and Eggers are the men for the job, and if anybody can pull off such an impossible project without eviscerating the Sendak spirit, it'd be them. (I'm grateful that Tim Burton didn't get his clawed, furry paws into this one.) But that doesn't vitiate the marketing questions that obsess industry-watchers: Who is "Where the Wild Things Are" meant for, and who will show up to see it?