Voyage d´hiver
By: Anne Brouillard
Publisher: Esperluète Editions, France, 2013 (Our version Orecchio acerbo, Italy, 2023)
Format: Leporello
A silent winter journey
I think Voyage d'hiver is one of the most silent silent books I have read. This is not a book that urges you to "word the story", it´s quite the opposite, a book for quite contemplation. Brouillard masterfully captures the kind of personal "bubble" one sometimes feel when travelling, just enjoying the changing landscape and the view.
In Voyage d'hiver, Brouillard lets the reader take place as a passenger. Apart from the journey, there is no "real" action, no human interactions, no dramatic highlight. Reading the book is like sitting on a train and watch the world glide by. There are people on the train station, and a few people on the other spreads, but they are clearly not the protagonists of this story: The reader is. The book is a narrative continuum, and it is the reader that sets the pace.
The winter setting is perfect for this quite journey. Snow is like a blanket, it muffles the sounds of the city: the traffic, the bustle of people, the contruction noice. Brouillard captures the winter light in a way that makes the reader feel the cold and hear the ice crackling. The light also help set a timeline from morning to night. There is a great attention to detail, like how the trees by the lakes look more frozen than the trees in the city. The artist has made a beautiful book without romantizising winter: The reader is not offered a perfect, white winter wonderland. In the pictures of the city, the streets are bare, and the impression is more grey than winter white, just like winter in the city usually plays out.
Like a passenger on a train ride, the reader is invited to watch and wonder. Who lives in all these houses, where are those birds flying, who sits in the cars on the street and where are they going? But first and foremost, the reader is invited to sit back and enjoy the winter view in silence. The subtle hints of humanity: the dark shadowy figures, the lights in the windows and the moving vehicles, leaves a lot of room for the readers imagination.
This book is a leporello. As all great leporellos, it works beautifully both if you leaf through the pages like in an "normal" book, and if you choose to unfold the leoprello and take in the long display all at once. It is a great choice of format. In the Victorian era, leporellos were commonly used as travel souvenires, offering portraits of scenic routes just like this.
The printing of the book leaves something to be desired. As many leporellos, this book comes in a box. The box is made of cardboard that is a little to flimsy for the purpose and therefore gets dented very easily. This little flaw does not diminish the artistic value of the book. The publishers call it "a long poem for the imagination", a very accurate description.
Anne Brouillard is an accomplished author and illustrator that has published a lot of titles, and won several prizes and awards over the years.
