The red book

A silent book about a silent book

The flap of the paper cover of Barbara Lehmann´s "The red book" lets the reader know what is to come: "This is a book about a book".  The story starts in a snowy city. We see a young girl that walks down the street, hugging her jacket to keep warm. She spots a red book lying in the snow and makes a full stop. Happily, she brings the book to school. She opens the book, and finds pictures of a boy on a beach that discovers a red book lying in the sand. The boy in the book opens his book, only to read about the girl sitting in her classroom... The girl runs outside, buys a bunch of balloons and flies away to meet the boy at the beach. But as she takes off, she drops her book. We now follow the action throught the pictures in the dropped book. We see the boy and the girl meet at the beach. In the end, the girl´s book close and is picked up by a young man on a bicycle.​​

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In "The red book" Lehman very cleverly uses an art technique called "mise en abyme", placing a copy of the artwork itself within the artwork. The technique is seen in many famous classical work, like  Velaquez´ painting "Las meninas" or Shakespeare´s play "Hamlet". This method can create an illusion of a never-ending story or sequence which is what Lehman does in "The red book". The effect is like a hall of mirrors, the story can go on and on infinitely.

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There are so many interesting aspects to the storytelling in "The red book". The physical apperance: when the paper cover is removed, the book you hold in your hand looks exactly like the book in the story you are reading about. The protagonist: Is it the girl or the red book itself? Well, that depends on how you read the story... The pages: Lehman frames the square illustrations in black, which combined with the rather large white border on most pages creates the effect of a page within a page.​The story can be read in so many ways. It can be read as an exciting adventure, a travel-through-literature, not unlike the Muppets famous method of "travel-by-map" (and interestingly, "The red book" was born from Lehman´s fascination with maps). It can be read as metafiction, as a book about reading, about how we, as readers, can dive into different worlds and feel real connections with the fictional characters.  It can be read as a book on the magic of possibilities. The brilliant sequence where the girl and boy realizes they can see each other, and then proceed to meet each other, can be read as a celebration of friendship. And as mentioned, the story does not really end: The girl´s book is picked up by a cyclist, and boy´s book ends up taken by the tide. What will happen next?
 

"The red book" was Barbarah Lehman´s breakthrough and won a well deserved "Caldecott Honor Award". Lehman has published several wordless books after this one, amongst them a sequel called "Red again". I love her self-portrait at the back flap, where she has pictured herself drawing a self-portrait, drawing a self-portrait, drawing... Brilliant.