I arrived home two nights ago to find this wonderful book waiting for me – it had to be read on the spot – before dinner, before TV, before everything. Every third page or so, I had to show to my husband (he will get to read the other pages when I have finished going through it several more times.
The book itself is beautiful – a large, solid hardback full of high-quality pages packed with exquisite black line drawings. This is a book for sharing, for dipping in and out of, over and over again. A book to place within reach, for any moments you need cheering up. It is impossible to read this book without a grin on your face.
The drawings are often surreal: a landscape turns into a train track, turns into a table top, turns into a cloths line. A skeleton, with scythe and handbag, takes a peacock for a walk, followed by a swan. A knight uses his lance as a fishing pole. A roughly drawn box dreams of mathematical precision, another sucks in an irregular squiggle, and extrudes a neat angular spiral.
The men have strong jaw-lines, like 1940s matinee idols. The older, matronly women may have torsos of fish or pigeons, the younger women have ridiculously high heels.
In two of the early sections sounds from speech and musical instruments are drawn synaesthetically. My two favourite drawings are of a young girl talking to an adult male, and of a harp being played. In the first, the little girl is babbling, maybe about her day – the animals and birds she saw, the boy she met. Her sentences are never complete – in her hurry to get everything out, one thought melds seamlessly into the next, as the line drawing spirals up into the air. The adult male barks out a loud angular jagged sentence that cuts across the little girl’s joyous recitation. The harp sings ethereal, insubstantial, yet beautiful music – its lines are not joined up, but swirl and float, building the suggestions of a butterfly and delicate plants.
There are mathematical images, symmetrical and mirror images, bodies made from mazes – all of which really appeal to me. Then there are the cubist images, a nod to Modrian in a family grouping. Cats, dogs, fish – and everywhere peacocks. Steinberg next moves on to his travels – USA with its cars on busy roads, motels and baseball; the Soviet Union with its warmly wrapped and multi-ethnic inhabitants. Then, right at the end – the labyrinths – tracing paths from A to B.
This is a book to savour, a book to buy as a present for yourself and/or for someone you care about. I cannot recommend it highly enough.