“VENERDÌ RE-VERSO”
“Imagination does not mean lying.”
This is a book for children; this is a book for adults; it’s a book for teachers; it’s a book for dreamers: this is Daniel Pennac, ladies and gentlemen. Not all of the French author’s works reach such heights, yet this book should be read and reread at all ages, laughing (sometimes bitterly) and reflecting on many small, important themes, without seeking “easy solutions.”
As always, Pennac draws heavily from the material of the Parisian banlieue, a fertile land, just as fertile as all margins, borderlands. That’s where the best stories are born, a bookseller once told us. And so it is: on the border between childhood and adulthood, in the mix of origins and generations, the most significant and brilliant insights about humanity as a whole flourish.
A theme of punishment, it all starts here. The evil Professor Crastaing, the perfect epitome of every pre-adolescent nightmare, provides this clue: you wake up one morning and you’ve grown up, your parents become children. A recipe for disaster. Or is it? The magic pen that gave rise to the professional scapegoat and the rights of the reader accomplishes yet another feat. Everything comes true, everything is real. And the professor’s warning, “imagination does not mean lying,” is embodied in a dazzling role reversal that calls into question all the protagonists.
But there’s more to it than the literary game: there’s a discussion of the founding myth of childhood, the inescapable place from which everything begins, for better or for worse; integration is discussed not in an abstract or sophisticated way, but through desires and fears, as it were, seen from within and not explained from without; there are many different loves, none of them idealized: that of father and son, that lost in death or escape, that remembered and that new, disarming and luminous.
There’s also the old queen of the streets, the magnificent Yolanda, who, thanks to years of listening, has learned to see a little deeper than everyone else. Pennac wields irreverence like a magician, and if you’re a little exasperated by a certain kind of correctness, the kind that builds taboos and prevents concepts from evolving, try reading this: “Children all begin with metaphysics, adolescents continue with morality, and we adults end with logic and accounting.” There are two possibilities: either you act as accountants and struggle to defuse a sentence like that, or you try a handstand, stand upside down and watch everything from there: “Tell me what happens next.”
Written by Delis
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Daniel Pennac, Signori bambini, Feltrinelli, Milano, 1998
Original edition: Messieurs les enfants, Gallimard, Paris, 1997