FICTION
The Magician’s Elephant, by Kate DiCamillo, $16.99
Mistakenly conjured up by a mediocre magician, an elephant crashes through the opera house of a 19th-century European city and at once becomes different things to different people.
For 10-year-old Peter, the creature fulfills a fortuneteller’s improbable prediction about his long-lost baby sister. The animal is a source of pain for a noblewoman crippled by it, a symbol of change for a kindly police officer and a persistent dream figure for an orphan girl.
But the elephant, imprisoned in a plush ballroom, yearns for home, and this desire, acted upon by Peter, brings together these disparate characters in a snowy moment of compassion and joy.
Newbery Medalist Kate DiCamillo tells a timeless tale as “strange and lovely and promising” as her title character. The occasional illustrations are dreamlike and magical. In delicate shades of gray, Yoko Tanaka’s acrylics convey the city’s low wintry light and the mood of a place haunted by a recent, unnamed war.
With its rhythmic sentences and fairy-tale tone, this novel (for ages 8 to 13) yields solitary pleasures but begs to be read aloud.
Hearing it in a shared space can connect us, one to one, regardless of age, much like the book’s closing image: a small stone carving, hands linked, of the elephant’s friends.
NONFICTION
Beg, Borrow, Steal: A Writer’s Life
, by Michael Greenberg, $19.95
The short pieces in “Beg, Borrow, Steal” are in the tradition of the literary-journalistic essays that Europeans call feuilletons. Although flexible, this form requires skill and concision, and Michael Greenberg uses it brilliantly.
Personal experience is at the center of each piece, but none is solipsistic; the tone is understated and ironic, and every essay contains a hard-won glimmer of insight.
The son of a determinedly non-bookish Jewish immigrant who owned a scrap-metal yard, Greenberg rejected his father’s business and devoted himself to the life of a writer. He scraped by on a number of small jobs, sorting mail, interpreting for Spanish- speaking defendants in criminal court, and selling cosmetics on a street corner. He finally achieved recognition with “Hurry Down Sunshine,” a memoir about his daughter’s descent into madness.
With “Beg, Borrow, Steal,” he ponders the ethics of using other people’s lives for his work. He describes a visit to Argentina during its state-sponsored war against trade-unionists, students and activists.
While he was there, he met Jorge Luis Borges; his girlfriend stumbled on a demonstration and was imprisoned; and on her release they conceived his son.
Greenberg also recounts his experiences at his Hebrew school, where he and his classmates cruelly and ignorantly imitated the stutter of their Torah teacher, an Auschwitz survivor; describes killing a chicken; tells the story of Hart Island, where prisoners bury the indigent dead.
More than anything else, Greenberg is a poet of New York, evoking in these fleeting pieces the city in all its scuffed and squalid grandeur.
