.tnyfrontrow recalls a beloved children’s book about a mouse reviewing cheese, which was, “in its way, a foundational text for the formation of a critic’s sensibility.”
Illustration by Paul Galdoneearlier this week: “ ‘where did you have your first aesthetic awakening?’ ” Instantly, the question sent me into a rabbit hole of memory, like a fast-motion special-effects scene in a movie that whooshes a character through a montage of recollections and into the distant past.
Other old books stand out in my mind from right around the same time—especially the navigation manual that my father, who’d served in the Army Air Forces in the Second World War, had brought home in 1945 and kept ever since. When I read it, uncomprehendingly, the navigational part hardly took and the military ideas went right over my head. But the parts about administering first aid and treating wounds stuck: fantasies of abstract carnage and dedicated treatment.
The book’s narrative is set in motion when Anatole suffers a blow to his honor: while raiding a private home, he hears its owners curse mice, calling them “terrible,” “dirty,” and “a disgrace to France.” “To be a mouse is to be a villain!” they declare. When he gets back to his own home, he confides his shame to his wife, Doucette. She wonders, in response, “If only we could give people something in return.
I wouldn’t have known, at the age of five, what it meant to be a critic, but “Anatole” was, in its way, a foundational text for the formation of a critic’s sensibility. I learned, through Anatole’s cheese reviews, that, by expressing one’s pleasures and displeasures, one could make a positive contribution to the world, and that the expression of one’s very personal sense of taste, if done the right way, could itself be a creative act.
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