O regresso
By: Natalia Chernysheva
Publisher: Bruaá Edicao e design, Portugal, 2014
(Our version: "Die Rückkehr, Atlantis-Verlag, Switzerland, 2015)
Format: Hardback
Feels like home
There are many examples of books that are made into films. O regresso is one of the rare examples of the opposite: Natalia Chernysheva is originally an animation film-maker that chose to make one of her films into a silent book. We have not had access to the movie, but review the book on it´s own terms.
The title translates to The return, and has an undertitle A mother-daughter history. The illustrations are all plays on perspectives and sizes. At the cover, we see a giant girl, so big that she has to bend her neck in order to fit the page, hovering over a tiny house. Inside the book, we learn that the girl lives in a city, and travels through the woods in order to reach her destination, a small house. When she arrives, she is even bigger, now we only see her legs, the rest of her is outside the book. A old lady, portrayed as a tiny little figure with a yellow hat greets her.
The couple hug and kiss, the old woman cooks supper - the girl still being a giant, holding her mothers tiny yellow hat to her head. As soon as dinner is served, there is a shift: suddenly the daughter is the tiny one, like a child. The book ends with the mother and daughter sitting close together in the yard.
O regresso will offer very different reading experiences depending on whether the reader is a child or an adult. Most children I have shared it with, inteprets the soup as a magic food that makes the giant girl shrink, which makes for lots of fun stories! For many adults,
it might touch the complex feelings of motherhood and mother-daughter relationships: The feeling we might get of being "too big" when we visit our childhood home, or the feeling we get as mothers when we realize our children are now fully independent adults. But in the middle of those feelings the parent-child bond will always linger, and at some point emerge. I have had so many interesting conversations based on this book, as many readers seem to identify with either the girl, the mother or both. Chernysheva leaves a lot of room for her readers in her illustrations, there is lots of white space on every page, and spare use of colors, so there is plenty of room literally "fill in the blanks" with your life experiences and imagination.
This is a silent book also in the way that it is quite small, and the cover is not that eyecatching inbetween the traditional colorful picturebooks - making it a book that is easily overlooked in a library or a bookstore. But O regresso is a lot larger than it´s modest apperance, and the feelings it evokes in the reader will linger long after it is finished.
