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Five Go on a Strategy Away Day by Enid Blyton/Bruno Vincent – The Famous Five in the corporate world
Five Go on a Strategy Away Day by Enid Blyton/Bruno Vincent. (2018) French title: Le Club des Cinq part en séminaire. Translated and adapted by Anne-Laure Estèves.
I belong to a generation who fell in love with crime fiction by reading The Famous Five (in French, Le Club des Cinq), Nancy Drew (in French, Alice), Fantômette, a French series with a female super-hero, The Secret Seven (in French, Le Clan des Sept) and Les Six Compagnons, a French series set in Lyon. I remember devouring these books and requesting frequent trips to the library.
These are wonderful reading memories, books that led me to Agatha Christie and many other crime fiction writers.
So, when I saw Five Go on a Strategy Away Day, just before going to one of those myself, I couldn’t resist the impulse to discover how the Famous Five would deal with modern management techniques. It’s a small vintage publication that plays well on the nostalgia felt by readers like me. They replicated the original feel of the covers, the illustrations inside. The translation technique is the same as well: everything is adapted to the French setting, the theme song, the metro and train rides, the food. That’s what translators used to do and sometimes not only for children literature.
Our five friends Julian, George, Dick, Anne and Timothy (respectively in French, François, Claude, Mick, Annie and Dagobert) work for the same firm –well, not Timmy, obviously—and are going on a strategy away day. They go to Normandy, in a remote farm and are welcome by consultants who are going to manage the various activities of the day. We found there all the common team building techniques that everyone working in the corporate world at a management position has experienced. The relaxation consultant, the blind-you-teammate-and-make-them-reach-point-A-to-point-B-without-bumping-into-objects, the post-its moments to note down ideas, the personality tests whose result will help you know who you are and help you communicate efficiently with colleagues and team members and the inevitable race in the woods to bring flags home.
All of it is described quickly and accurately as we see our childhood fictional friends navigate the corporate sea. It’s not the book of the year but it’s a nice journey-into-the past experience laced with a healthy dose of self-mockery. It reminds you that management techniques are useful but one needs to keep their critical mind and use them wisely.
Science fiction in Europe. Reality in America.
My Parents Open Carry (2015) by Brian G. Jeffs & Nathan R. Nephew.
A friend of mine sent me this children’s book for Christmas, not as an actual gift but as a oh-my-god-she-needs-to-see-this present. So here I am opening My Parents Open Carry and gasping from the first page to the last. Flaberggasted and appalled are the right adjectives to describe how I felt about this as a reader, as a mother and as a person.
The authors who committed this opus wrote its foreword and it tells everything about it:
This book was written in the hope of providing a basic overview of the right to keep and bear arms as well as the growing practice of the open carry of a hand gun. Our fear is that our children are being raised with a biased view of our constitution and especially in regards to the 2nd Amendment. Before writing this, we looked for pro-gun children’s books and couldn’t find any. Our goal is to provide a wholesome children’s book that reflects the views of the majority of the American people, i.e. that self-defense is a basic natural right and that firearms provide the most efficient means for that defense. We truly hope you will enjoy this book and read and discuss it with your children over and over again.
Follows the edifying day of the Strong family who shops in different stores and tries to convince people that they should carry guns and ends up at the shooting range. Their thirteen years old girl Brenna receives her first gun because she got good grades and it’s her first practice day. (!!)
Apart from being morally condemnable, this book is also poorly written and illustrated. Children’s books are also literature and good ones require a talented writer and a gifted illustrator. No literary or drawing talent of any kind was poured in this book.
The substance? It is full of fallacious arguments, dumb comparisons and syllogisms. Stupidest comparison ever: carrying a gun is like putting on your seatbelt; it’s for your safety and you hope you’ll never need it. Syllogism? Chainsaws are dangerous and yet sold in shops. Guns are dangerous. Therefore, guns may be sold in shops. (!!!)
I assure you this is not April Fools’ Day and that this book actually exists. The comforting part of the foreword is that the authors couldn’t find any pro-gun children’s book. I don’t know if their assumption about the American’s people thinking that self-defense is a basic natural right is true. I hope not.
For me, reading this is like reading science fiction. The whole debate about open carry and conceal carry has no grounds because the carry shouldn’t exist in the first place. The saddest part of it is that these pro-gun advocates/writers live in constant fear. They think they can get robbed or attacked anytime and need to feel ready to fight back. They talk about checking their surroundings all the time. What kind of life is that? Fear is the worst leader to make intelligent decisions. It works with the least evolved part of our brain. Considering the rubbish this children’s book spews from its pages, this very part of the authors’ brain was involved in its conception.
I feel like sending President Obama a box of tissues. He’s not done crying.
The three puddin’ musketeers
The Magic Pudding (1918) by Norman Lindsay (1879-1969)
We swear to stand united, Three puddin’-owners bold.
Lisa chose The Magic Pudding as my Humbook gift for Christmas and receiving a book starring a pudding is kind of spot on for Christmas, isn’t it? She hoped I could read it along with my daughter but alas, no French translation was found. So it’s just me writing about it now.
The Magic Pudding is a traditional Australian children book, featuring Sam Swanoff, Bill Barnacle, Bunyip Bluegum and a Magic Pudding named Albert. He’s a steak-and-kidney pudding with gravy who regenerates himself when eaten. So basically, the pudding-owners can’t starve. The story starts when Bunyip Bluegum decides to leave his home to see the world. Along the road, he meets and befriends with Sam and Bill and they decide to travel together. Their magic pudding is much wanted by Pudding Thieves incarnated by a possum and a wombat. The story is mostly about rescuing the pudding from being stolen. The plot is simple enough to appeal to children and an undercurrent of irony lets adults understand that there’s more to it than the apparent story.
When I discovered Lisa’s pick for me, I thought, “Children lit? Piece of cake!” (Or in this case “Slice of pudding!”) How wrong I was. Firstly, I forgot (again) that Australia is far away and that there are many things about the environment that I don’t know about. So I ended up reading on the kindle and with a tablet in front of me set on Google image where I’d look for pictures of wombats, barnacles, bandicoots, bunyips, kookaburra, flying-foxes, possums and wart-hogs. Secondly, I forgot that Australian English is like Canadian French: same language but lots of different words. The definitions of words in the kindle dictionary would often start with “Early 17th century”, which brought the comparison with Canadian French. (Nincompoop, galore). And of course, there’s slang. Fortunately, Lisa came to my rescue and sent me a link to a website for Australian slang. In addition, there are Hergé-esque insults like ‘Of all the swivel-eyed, up-jumped, cross-grained, sons of a cock-eyed tinker,’ which are probably very funny with their Captain Haddock style but were lost on me. Plus, there are distorted words like in this sentence
‘You ain’t poisoned, Albert,’ said Bill. ‘That was only a mere ruse de guerre, as they say in the noosepapers.’
I could guess this one but I still wonder how many of them I missed. The text is also full of songs and has a folk-song musical style like here:
Out sprang Bill and Sam and set about the puddin’-thieves like a pair of windmills, giving them such a clip-clap clouting and a flip-flap flouting, that what with being punched and pounded, and clipped and clapped, they had only enough breath left to give two shrieks of despair while scrambling back into Watkin Wombat’s Summer Residence, and banging the door behind them.
I read slowly, trying to hear the musicality in my head.
And last but not least, I forgot how much children literature can be rooted in the quotidian. The book keeps telling about this steak-and-kidney pudding with gravy and I don’t even know what it tastes like. Initially, I thought pudding was a dessert. The mention of steak-and-kidney in a dessert didn’t bother me, after all, English cuisine has the reputation to be weird and I knew about the ingredients of mincemeat. Then, they mentioned the gravy and everything I had imagined about this pudding crumbled.
Reading The Magic Pudding was an unexpected challenge. It made me think again about how hard it is to know about another country without growing up there. Reading this children book reminded me of all the tiny cultural details that build a country and hold a society together. It was also confusing because I guessed that Norman Lindsay was sending messages to the adults through the apparently innocent adventures of the Pudding Owners against the Pudding Thieves. Bunyip Bluegum speaks like an English aristocrat and Sam and Bill came on a ship but speak like sailors –or English criminals deported to Australia? I wonder if they represent the ruling class and the first settlers in Australia. The Pudding Thieves are a wombat and a possum, typically Australian fauna. Do they represent the natives? I couldn’t help wondering about a metaphorical pudding. Wealth in the form of everlasting food is kept by the pudding owners while the others are condemned to try to steal their share…
Even if it’s been a challenging read, thanks Lisa for choosing this book and for answering my questions while I was reading. I feel a bit frustrated because I know that I didn’t understand everything but I’m glad I had the opportunity to read about this classic of Australian literature for children.
Book Around the Corner 