Books, pt. 2: The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear

The 13½ Lives of Captain Bluebear is the most exciting book I’ve read in quite a while. The book itself is very exciting, but what I really mean is that it gave me the visceral thrill of reading more than any book since maybe The Golden Gate, Vikram Seth’s stunningly gorgeous novel in verse. I can’t read Russian, but if the translation I read is anything to go by, I think Golden Gate is better, even, than its forerunner, Eugene Onegin. One of my favorite half-sonnets goes,

O loveliness, contrained and free!
Ah, Mozart, prince of music makers
Who (for the miracle you gave)
Lie buried in an unmarked grave!
Now the world movers and world shakers
–Archbisops, stewards, counts, and kings–
Rot voiceless, you still lend us wings.

Anyway, that has nothing at all to do with Bluebear. I just like to hype Golden Gate, which for some reason doesn’t get as much attention as Seth’s other books. From Heaven Lake is also too ignored - it’s a wonderful travelogue about hitchhiking from Nanjing to Calcutta through Tibet.

Getting back to the best children’s book since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire: while waiting for my Indian visa, I was killing time at Green Apple Books, my current favorite bookstore, on Clement Street, one of my favorite streets in San Francisco. You know those little cards where stores tell you what’s good? Green Apple might as well be wallpapered in them, and as far as I can tell, every one of them is right on. Everyone who works there seems to have really good taste. Bluebear was one of these books, and boy, am I glad I took the gamble and got it on top of English, August (see below), which was the book I was actually looking for.

Apparently, Bluebear was some huge bestseller in Germany, a country with notably good instincts in the realm of children’s books, the land of Struwwelpeter and The Neverending Story, which, let me tell you, is an incredibly rad book, and probably 9 times better than the movie, which is also awesome. It’s by some dude named Walter Moers, who seems to have written a bunch of these types of books. I ordered another one, but messed up the shipping, so hopefully it’ll get to me before I leave for India on Sunday. Bluebear is, as you might expect, a blue bear. You may not know, though, that bluebears have 27 lives. This is the story of his first 13½, told as a memoir. Bluebear doesn’t know how he was born, but he showed up as a tiny baby bluebear, floating in a walnut shell, about to fall into the fearsome Malmstrom, a vast whirlpool. Luckily, the Minipirates rescued him, and he spent a happy youth singing pirate songs with them and futilely trying to attack ships that never heeded the tiny corsairs. Eventually, he grows too big, and the Minipirates tearfully set him ashore on an island with a stock of coconuts, but he eventually dies of thirst. The next 12½ lives, though, are considerably more eventful. The book’s very reminiscent of The Phantom Tollbooth, one of my favorite children’s books, in that the hero visits all sorts of different lands and meets a lot of strange people, but Bluebear is probably even more inventive, plus it has more pictures and maps. It’s actually sort of odd to even call it a children’s book - it has a lot of hard vocabulary, and measures a satisfying 703 pages.