Breath

In college I minored in history. I now think that I probably should have double-majored: english and history (maybe tripled, theatre). Since graduating, my fascination--obsession may be a better word--with history has only grown. It's incredible to wonder at the scale of lives that have come before ours, each one unique and important. There are so many stories in those multitudinous lives. I think it would be nearly impossible to be a good reader (which is what I strive for) and be bored by the past. In fact I doubt if it's possible to be fully engaged with the world, and be bored by the past.

I am always surprised how history receives a bad rap in our culture (but then I am also puzzled by how 'intelligence' is given a bad rap too). Like math and science, history is usually considered a boring subject, only for specialists, i.e. geeks, nerds, and the like. At most history to us is a source of entertainment (i.e. movies) or a harmless hobby and not illumination. A basic example is the amount of not only badly made historic films, but also the amount of inaccuracy in Hollywood. A film may cost three hundred million, but none of this seems to go into any actual research. There are of course exceptions: Master and Commander comes immediately to mind. But as usual I am digressing, let me just say that history--while always entertaining--is more than entertainment, and the past deserves more respect and curiosity than is usually granted it.

I don't think Donna Jo Napoli is well known outside of the YA market; this is a shame. From the two novels I have read of hers, she is a sublime novelist of history. She is a masterful storyteller with a style that punches by way of its simplicity. Using just a few sentences she can craft historical places and times that prove both recognizable and entirely alien. I imagine any run-of-the-mill time traveler would undergo a similar experience. Most of her novels take familiar fairy-tales or myths and attempt a new spin on them while infusing raw and gritty historical 'reality' over most of the fantastical elements (in fact it is only really when Napoli attempts 'fantasy' that her stories slip a bit and fade).

Breath is a retelling of the medieval story of the pied piper who stole away Hamelin's rats (and children) by music. But really Breath only focuses on this traditional part of the story in the last fifty or so pages, and it is the previous two hundred that I found truly enthralling. Here we see a small, 13th Century German town and farmstead recreated in brief, yet utterly believeable, detail (a scene in which a grandmother and grandson make a sparrow-pie dinner sticks out). Salz--our narrator crippled with cystic fibrosis--tells his story in heart-breaking, stark prose. One minute he's playing with his new kitten, and the next he's stricken with tremendous, life-threatening pain, but the change is so abrupt and simple, the reader hardly recognizes it until they are in the midst of the pain, with Salz.

The bulk of the book deals with the slow destruction of Hamelin as a mysterious illness overtakes one household after another. The disease is blamed on a sudden increase in rats--hence the piper. But the disease takes on a form that may be even more terrifying than the black plague (which had not yet reached Europe from Asia in 1284 when the novel takes place). This plague instead causes night-madness: hallucinations, sexual deviance, explosive violence. Salz proves immune to this sickness (whose scientific nature is explained thoroughly in an Afterward by Napoli), and it is through these innocent eyes that we watch his family, and the whole town, suffer a fate worse than death. It is a nightmarish Jekyll-and-Hyde vision, gut-wrenching and haunting. And Napoli protrays it with such care and simplicity that the terror rises almost unbeknown. Certainly, it is unwelcome, even by the reader: one cannot help but react to the town's devastation with even more disbelief than does Salz.

As with Bound, the other Napoli novel I have read, the book loses some of its focus and even believability in the last few chapters. By hewing so close to the Pied Piper story, she gets herself stuck in a situation that is just not believable, and starkly so against the gritty realism of the rest. Still the book is harrowing, affective, and give you a better glimpse of the 13th century than almost any movie and most other books. Rather meant for adults or children. However, if you're looking for a good medieval antithesis to Breath (that's still every bit as wonderful and accurate) check out Adam of the Road, a wondrous, beautiful tale of a boy who loses his father and dog in the medieval England.

If Breath sounds like it shouldn't be meant for children, that's probably right. In my mind this is really a 14 and up YA novel, however a mature 12-year-old could probably handle it. But this brings up one of the depressing issues surrounding "Young Adult Literature" (and there are many). More and more books are being classified young adult simply by the age of the narrator or main character and not neccesarily based on content and/or the author's desired audience. Donna Jo Napoli is a wonderful writer for young adults, but she is also a wonderful writer for any age. But how many adults take YA literature into consideration when choosing their next book? Of course, the majority of YA novels are crap, but this doesn't mean the gems should be stuck in the same category. Having spent the last nine months reading and re-reading children's literature, I can safely say that a lot of it deserves wider attention than it receives and some of it deserves far less attention than it already gets (i.e. Gossip Girls series, The Clique series, and any of the other trashy, nullifying kid lit. out there).

Well that is enough of this rambling entry where I seemed to cover everything (and resolve little) from American society's take on history to the actual book to various issues in classifying books as Young Adult. Next time (Shakespeare returns) I'll try to focus a little more.

(Book borrowed from work; picture above is of the hardcover edition, because I think that cover is far better)

Breath

By: Donna Jo Napoli

Simon Pulse, June 2005

Paperback, 272 pages

ISBN: 068986177X