THE INCANDESCENCE OF A CHILD'S TALE

A tiny children's book tells an epic tale of life and death. More than 30 years after getting published in Italy, this book has made its way into the Anglophone world.

GLOWRUSHES by Roberto Piumini published by The New York Review of Books. in 2022. Translated by Leah Janeczko from the Italian.

Around the end of 2023, I heard about a children’s book called GLOWRUSHES by Roberto Piumini. I’d seen a New York Times Book Review about this little book and I was intrigued. I discovered that the author is a beloved children’s writer in Italy and I wanted to read the book first before I bought it for my grandnieces.

“Once in a great while a book comes along that’s equally enthralling for children and the people they call grown-ups — a book playful and accessible enough to hold a young person’s attention yet sufficiently resonant and complex to keep a seasoned reader turning its pages, sometimes even while fighting back tears.”

~Joseph Luzzi, A Masterpiece About a Masterpiece, for All Ages

At 125 pages, it’s a sprint of a read. The wisdom squished into this book is worth its weight in gold. Presumably, a great children’s book offers even greater wisdom for adults in spite of how they sometimes have the extraordinary capacity to behave like children.

Books like GLOWRUSHES also make me reckon with how the world of Anglophone publishing is a monolith. It took thirty years for a translation of this children’s book—the wonderful translator here is Leah Janeczko—to turn up in the crowded world of young English readers. In this parallel reading universe called English, J. K. Rowling’s first book, HARRY POTTER AND THE PHILOSOPHER’S STONE, published by Bloomsbury in 1997 four years after Piumini’s GLOWRUSHES, is now a collector’s item that fetches thousands of dollars. (Two copies of Rowling’s first edition sold for £9000 pounds in 2007). It does make us wonder at the unfairness of it all, as if the only ideas of merit are those conceived in the English language.

Piumini is a prolific Italian writer for children and has won many laurels for his work. From 1991 onwards, he authored 27 books out of which I believe only a handful have been translated into English. Italy’s leading authority in the field of children’s literature, Piumini received the Gianni Rodari Lifetime Achievement Award in 2020 and was nominated for the Hans Christian Andersen Award in both 2020 and 2022.

From Rome to Rimini, from Milan to Messina, in every bookshop and school in Italy, you’re bound to find books by Roberto Piumini. An entire generation of Italians was raised with his stories and has grown up to read them to their own children. But if you’re from an English-speaking country, chances are you’ve never heard of this award-winning author. Which is a pity, because it means you’ve never seen the cook Totò Sapore escape from prison by climbing down a rope made of spaghetti! 

~~~Worldkidlit.org

The story told by GLOWRUSHES begins in a village deep inside Turkey where a man called Sakumat is a painter whose artistic gifts are known far and wide. Many hundred miles away from him, an affluent lord would like to see him right away. Sakumat travels to the man’s home to be told that the rich man’s little son Madurer is in the last months of his life.

Madurer is afflicted by a mysterious illness owing to which he cannot be exposed to sunlight or fresh air. The boy is confined to three windowless rooms inside the palace. His father pleads with the painter: Can he, Sakumat, please paint the boy’s room for him to bring a little joy and color into his life?

What begins as an act of bringing color into a young boy’s life becomes the painter’s life project. Sakumet becomes the boy’s best friend, while attempting to paint what flows through the boy’s mind.

But first you need to tell me about the things you’ve seen, the pictures that are dear to you. You need to take me on a journey through your mind. Then we’ll decide and I’ll help you.

That day, Madurer began to tell stories.  Madurer spoke about mountains and valleys, hillsides covered with orchards, dense forests and tilled fields, villages with white rooftops and red rooftops, and lively streets lined with tall trees bending in the wind.

The beauty and spirituality of this book are in the giving and the taking. As the painter receives from the boy and begins his murals, his relationship with the boy begins to deepen until, one day, Madurer, too, joins him in the act of painting the wall whenever his health permits him to do so. Together, Sakumat and Madurer travel the world on the paintbrush that puts them both on a boat on the open sea.

All I can say is I had goosebumps pretty much the whole time while reading this terrific story. It’s a deeply philosophical tale laden with so much meaning that it seemed a travesty to put it down without seeing it through to completion..

By the time the story ends, Sakumat the painter is a changed man. His beard is all white. Inwardly, too, everything has shifted. How can Sakumat ever pick up his brush again?

When I put the book down I went back to the words on the first chapter of the boook which tells us about Sakumat’s passion for his art. What happens when art commingles with life? It produces sublime art while snuffing out life, too, a little at a time.

“Yet even if no one had requested his artwork, Sakumat would have painted all the same, because to him brushes were like fingers and with each brushstroke he tenderly offered a drop of his life’s blood.”