Review by New York Times Review
THE BULGARIA OF my childhood was bereft of the classics of American children's literature. Instead, I grew up with the unsugared Brothers Grimm and the strangeness of Lewis Carroll. I discovered "The Velveteen Rabbit" and "The Giving Tree" and "Charlotte's Web" only as a young adult, and found in them a shock of warmth and wisdom for my fledgling life as an immigrant. I still remember sitting on a Brooklyn rooftop and reading "Where the Wild Things Are" for the first time, well into my 20 s, aching with dislocation from the world and a roaring sense of lack of control. I remember feeling suddenly awash in reassurance that the inconsolable loneliness of living is survivable, that love can be steadfast and belonging possible even amid the world's wildness. "I don't write for children," Maurice Sendak told Stephen Colbert in his last on-camera appearance, four months before his death in 2012. "I write - and somebody says, 'That's for children!"' From his largely forgotten 1956 debut as the author-illustrator of a picture book, "Kenny's Window" - a philosophically inclined parable of love, loneliness and knowing what you really want - to his perhaps most beloved masterpieces, "Where the Wild Things Are" and "In the Night Kitchen," to his final farewell to the world, the beautiful and sorrowful "My Brother's Book," Sendak has enchanted generations with singularly illustrated stories that delight children and emanate existential consolation for the trauma of living. PRESTO AND ZESTO IN LIMBOLAND (Michael di Capua/HarperCollins, 28 pp., $18.95; ages 4 and up), Sendak's posthumously published collaboration with the writer and director Arthur Yorinks, is not one of those books. At least not at first glance. Rather, it is the playful story of two friends' adventures in a topsyturvy world, part "Alice in Wonderland," part Grimm fairy tale, part prescient analogue for the nonsensical cultural moment we inhabit. "One day Presto and Zesto, good friends, took a walk and ended up in Limboland," we read. "They didn't mean to go there, who would go there, but they had a lot on their minds." In this uncanny world, two sugar beets are getting married, but their perfect wedding gift - a set of bagpipes, of course - is in the hands of the formidable Bumbo, a monster resembling a Wild Thing skinned of sweetness. As the two journey through Limboland to steal the bagpipes from Bumbo, they encounter visual strangenesses left unexplained - a mole holding a ruler, a goat's rear sticking up from a pond - indulging the way children's minds so naturally whisper This could be us at even the most bizarre and improbable vignettes. The story is not so much a story as a narrative filmstrip reeled around Sendak's art - 10 drawings he created in 1990 as projections for a London Symphony Orchestra performance of a 1927 opera setting Czech nursery rhymes to music. Sendak resurfaced the art once more for a charity concert in 1997, then tucked it away for good. But Yorinks - a friend of Sendak's for more than four decades who had collaborated with him on two previous children's books, "The Miami Giant" and "Mommy" - had fallen in love with the drawings and never forgot them. He brought them up over a work lunch with Sendak and suggested that they might be a book - a book in need of a story. That afternoon, the two friends arranged the pictures on Sendak's drawing table and, in a state of creative flow punctuated by wild bursts of laughter, began improvising the story. They refined the manuscript over the coming months and declared it a picture book. But then, as it happens in life, life happened. "Presto and Zesto" vanished in the shadow of other projects. One day long after his friend's death, Yorinks received a note from Sendak's longtime assistant and now literary executor, Lynn Caponera, alerting him that she had discovered among the author's papers a strange manuscript titled "Presto and Zesto in Limboland." I imagine how difficult it must have been for Yorinks to revisit this story of two friends, named after the nicknames he and Sendak had for each other; how difficult and beautiful to see it morph into a private elegy - in the classic dual sense of lamentation and celebration - for a lost friendship. And so, six years after Sendak's death, this unusual picture book is finally being born. It is both like and unlike classic Sendak. At times, there are leaps in the narrative that strain the effort to stitch the drawings into a cohesive story. As a young man, when asked to illustrate a book of Tolstoy's short stories, Sendak had confided in his editor - the visionary Ursula Nordstrom - that he admired the "cohesion and purpose" of Tolstoy's narrative but feared that his art would fail to match it. Nordstrom, ever the nurturer of unpolished genius, assured him otherwise. He did illustrate Tolstoy. This formative storytelling ideal of "cohesion and purpose" became an animating force of his work. Perhaps Sendak put "Presto and Zesto" in a drawer because he was unsure the book had achieved this. But I am glad it lives. In a story propelled by surprise after surprise in deliberate defiance of the expectations of ordinary reality, where logical discontinuity is a vehicle of joy, these leaps furnish rather than obstruct the whimsical world-building. The dialogue between image and story becomes essentially an act of translation, calling to mind the Nobel-winning Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska's lovely notion of "that rare miracle when a translation stops being a translation and becomes ... a second original." maria popova is the founder of Brainpickings.org.
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [July 11, 2019]
Review by Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Often after an author or illustrator's death, unpublished manuscripts are found in drawers. Many deserve to stay there but not this one. In his afterword, Yorinks describes this book's complicated journey, which began with Sendak paintings that were used as projections for an orchestral suite based on Czech nursery rhymes. Eventually the two friends and sometime collaborators (who called themselves Presto and Zesto), turned them into a book, which was forgotten until after Sendak's death, when an aide unearthed it. The story stars the aforementioned duo who, looking for cake, find themselves in Limboland. The plot, such as it is, involves finding a gift for the Sugar Beets wedding, where, with any luck, there will be cake. They learn only that the horrid Bumbo has the only wedding gift in town, which they must appropriate. Along the way, they meet up with a languid goat, a scissors-wielding bear, and a singing cow and those are just the animals. The pictures are vintage Sendak: wry, wild, and with all sorts of mysteries tucked away in the corners. For adults who know the backstory, it's fairly easy to see how the pictures began as unrelated. But Yorinks, using his trademark clever nonsense iced with irony, reveals a tale that links everything together in riotous fashion. An unexpected gift.--Ilene Cooper Copyright 2018 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
In 1990, Maurice Sendak created 10 images for the performance of an orchestral suite of Czech nursery rhymes. Several years later, his friend and collaborator Yorinks (Company's Coming) proposed that they write a story to go with them. They knew that in order to knit the unrelated images together, they'd have to resort to extravagant narrative invention. They cast Presto and Zesto, their nicknames for each other, as the story's heroes and used Sendak's panels to represent the scenes Presto and Zesto encounter when they arrive, inadvertently, in Limboland: "They didn't mean to go there, who would go there, but they had a lot on their minds." Despite the artifice, the story hangs together remarkably well-or at least stays true to its own bonkers logic. A wild-eyed shepherd boy tells them about the wedding of the sugar beets, and the friends set off to find the village's only suitable wedding present-a set of bagpipes possessed by the monster Bumbo. Sendak's bold and hilarious artwork features apoplectic villagers, disgruntled barnyard animals, fire, sharp implements, and a proliferation of goats ("Everybody has goats in Limboland"). Yet it's not all shenanigans. Deep Sendakian emotions are at work: Bumbo is a fleshy, terrifying behemoth; the sugar beet bride wears a delicate white veil and a Mona Lisa smile. Narrating in unmistakable Brooklynese sprinkled with Yiddish ("He still owes us five bubkes"), the storytelling voice evokes a particular-even poignant-time and place. The images hold some of the irrational, dreamlike childhood fears that Sendak returned to throughout his life as an artist (a bear with scissors, a big man with an axe), but Yorinks's broad humor makes the menace as easy to push aside as a theater curtain. It's a joy to have another glimpse at Sendak's magic. Ages 5-up. (Sept.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by School Library Journal Review
PreS-Gr 2-Humor and drama permeate this picaresque tale presented in loosely related episodes. An afterword by Yorinks describes the story's genesis (and exodus). Between 1925 and 1927, Czech composer Leos -Janáek composed Ríkadla, a choral piece inspired by both the charm of indigent nursery rhymes and their interpretation by compatriot, illustrator Josef Lada. In 1990, the London Symphony Orchestra invited Sendak to create projections for Janáek's music. Later, Yorinks and Sendak, who called each other Presto and Zesto, respectively, arranged the images and extemporized a connecting narrative featuring themselves searching for dessert and entering a strange realm. To escape, they must wrangle a present-bagpipes-from a devilish monster for the nuptials of two sugar beets, a lovely concluding scene with echoes of Caldecott. The narration combines nursery talk ("With a diddly-dee and a hippity-ho.") with kibitzing and kvetching: "Have you noticed.that you just can't get good cake anymore.?" The manuscript for this flight of fancy was forgotten until recently. Ridiculous situations, silly expressions, and discrepancy between text and image add wit: "...Presto and Zesto tippy-toed away and soon came upon a family thoroughly enjoying the fresh air." The page turn portrays an intimidating father chopping bread with an ax, a mother avoiding eye contact, and a boy pulling on a goat while eyeing another upside-down in the pond. The compositions are informed by Lada, but the style is unmistakable. -VERDICT Fresh Sendak art, a preposterous climax in which Presto's torn pants reveal his buttocks, and cake-what's not to like?-Wendy Lukehart, District of -Columbia Public Library © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Horn Book Review
Yorinks and Sendak take a wander through something like Sandburgs Rootabaga country via their alter egos Presto and Zesto, who find themselves in Limboland just in time for the wedding of the sugar beets. But what can they bring for a gift? The text is overextended but droll, with lots of tasty wordplay (Our thanks will be jumbo when you clobber that crum-bo) and dry asides (They came upon an old woman from the old country, the country where only old people live). The watercolor illustrations, originally created to be projected for a performance of Janceks nursery rhyme suite Rkadla, have plenty of bucolic jollies, like goats in trees and a tailoring bear (If you see a bear with scissorsRUN!). The pictures are united in their tone, style, and sense of fun but otherwise dont have a narrative line, and the story seems written around them, resulting in an arbitrary succession of events. Its a very pretty volume, though, perhaps best viewed as a souvenir of these longtime friends and artistic collaborators. A note by Yorinks explains how the story came to be, how it was lost, and how it came back together after Sendaks death. roger Sutton (c) Copyright 2018. The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright The Horn Book, Inc., a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
Based on Sendak's series of 10 illustrations of Czech nonsense rhymes, an equally nonsensical story.According to Yorinks' afterword, he and Sendak cooked it up on a lark, "riffing on a story that might turn these disparate pictures into a cohesive picture book." "Cohesive" is a stretch. The title characters find themselves one day in Limboland, where a "maniac shepherd boy" apprises them of the sugar beets' imminent nuptials. Told by a goat that if no one brings a present they will "all be stuck in Limboland forever," and learning that there is only one possible presentthe monster Bumbo's bagpipesthey determine to secure it. Their peregrinations take them past myriad peculiar scenes: a wood chopper taking an axe to a loaf of bread, a bear sewing his wedding outfit, a man cooking a woman in a cauldron, and "an old woman from the old countryusing mumbo-jumbo and heebie-jeebie," among others. They successfully steal the bagpipes, attend the wedding, eat cake, and go home. The framed, full-page illustrations, each set opposite a block of text, are trademark Sendak, populated by doughy, white humans and expressive animals in an Old World setting. Each taken by itself presents a patently absurd scenario that invites readers unfamiliar with the original rhymes to speculate on its circumstances. However, the narrative imposed by Yorinks and Sendak both closes off that avenue of imagination and fails to present anything resembling a satisfying story. Yorinks writes of the initial "brainstorming session" that "all I specifically rememberisboth of us laughing like crazy." Reading more like a private joke (and a rather mean-spirited one at that) than a story, this posthumous effort may please scholars but is likely to disappoint readers hoping for a new Sendak on par with his earlier works. (Picture book. 5-adult) Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
