Dishes A Delectable Dose of Surrealism
Dining at Magritte's by Michael Garland
There is a young man, age 9, in my life who sees the world differently than most folks. These differences are expressed in a variety of ways. One of his special talents is art. So when I first laid eyes on Dinner at Magritte's, I knew I had to buy it to share with him.
His mother and I discussed whether he would like the book or be frustrated or disturbed by it. The young man likes his world ordered, precise, and predictable. Dinner at Magritte's featured a day spent with Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte. The illustrations in the book are all as surrealistic as the works that those two artists are famous for.
So it was with a few reservations that I sat down to read the book to him. I shouldn't have worried.
Dinner at Magritte's begins with a bored boy by the name of Pierre. He is at his parents' summer cottage in France on a very hot day and his parents are boring him to tears. One is reading the newspaper and the other is knitting. Neither moves much at all. He then notices that someone is home at the Magritte's cottage and asks permission to go visit.
The Magrittes welcome him and invite him to dinner. He watches Rene Magritte paint, is introduced to Salvador Dali when he arrives for a visit, goes walking in the woods, plays croquet, has dinner with them, and plays charades.
In itself, author and artist Michael Garland's plot is rather mundane. It is only because of his artwork that this book comes to life and becomes one of the more interesting children's books I have yet read. In fact, for pure enjoyment, I would rank it above even Where the Wild Things Are.
The artwork starts out highly conventional, adding just a hint of the unexpected on the next page. It continues to build until the pictures are surrealistic in focus as well as in hidden details.
As Pierre watches Magritte paint, Magritte offers what is the best explanation of surrealism that I've ever read. Pierre asks Magritte why he is painting a picture of a bird while looking at the model of an egg. The response:
"Anyone can paint what they see," Magritte replied. "I like to paint what I think. I paint what I dream. So when people look at my paintings, they can see what's in my mind!"
Once the story has turned to Magritte's home, the illustrations become takeoffs of more famous paintings; paintings that Pierre, the Magrittes, and Salvador Dali are dropped into. It's an artist's pastiche. Throughout the pages you can catch Michael Garland's plays on the melting stopwatch, floating apples in front of faces, bowler hats, misleading windows, and boots filled with flowers. For the adult who has spent any time in museums or art history courses, there are constant jolts of recognition.
Yet, Garland manages to take the edge off some of the spookier images found in surrealism and stick with the surprising and the fun ones. The book is fun because you spend so much time staring at each picture and trying to find all the strange and wondrous details in them.
When Pierre returns home, Garland writes, When Pierre got home, his mother and father were in the parlor, the same as ever, as still as stone. Only now they really are stone statues with cracks crawling up their legs. Pierre has left the home of the Surrealists, but he has taken with him their way of looking at his environment and finding ways to express what he is thinking as well as what he sees. He goes to bed dreaming about what wonders he will find the next day.
The book then wraps up with a brief definition of surrealism, and short bios of Magritte, Dali, and Garland himself.
The book fascinated my nine-year-old friend and he showed once again how very sharp and attentive he is, finding many things that I had overlooked in my numerous readings of the book. He was the one who pointed out to me that Pierre's parents were starting to turn to stone on the very first page of the book. The petrification had already struck their feet and was crawling up their ankles.
He was also the one who discovered that hidden in each and every illustration-sometimes more than once-were the words "Kevin is Pierre." After looking at the dedication, we discovered that Kevin is one of the Garland's sons, and was likely the model for Pierre. It was a feature that I wouldn't have noticed had my young friend not pointed it out. We had great fun finding all the instances where the sentence was hidden.
This book is successful on a number of levels-which is why I wonder why it has not grown to be more popular than it is. My son's teacher loves the book and is looking for a copy for her classroom. It is the type of book that children who are too young to read can still enjoy, learn from, and make discoveries in. The language of the book is simple, but it includes several puns and wordplays and explains complex concepts in straightforward manners.
Though it is difficult to express in words alone what makes this book so fascinating and enjoyable, I can say that it will always be a favorite in our house. The book invites us to leave behind quiet conventionality and to apply our imagination so that we see the unusual in the normal. Garland whispers to us that we needn't be able to paint to create art from the world around us. He invites us to see the world through different perspectives.
It's an invitation well worth responding to-whether you are nine or ninety.
