Monday, August 27, 2007

A disturbing book

My wonderful sister, who knows me extremely well, brought me this book from Morocco. It's dual-language in French and Arabic. I don't actually know either, but I can read the characters for both and guess. (Latin and Farsi are beautiful things, even if they are both Indo-European.) She, on the other hand, can read Arabic somewhat. So we comfortably flopped on the floor together and made what we could of it.

It was traumatic! It's a picture book, so we assumed it would be nice. It was not. I missed most of the finer plot points, but with words like "sahara" and "jamal" and "loups" and "mort," we were able to pick up the gist. It was about a camel who gets separated from his caravan, and the wolves eat his carcasse.

On that disturbing discovery, we went and petted the cat.

2 comments:

Gabi said...

Other countries, it seems, have odd sensibilities when it comes to children's literature. At least it's linguistically fun.

I didn't know your sister was in Morocco! Lucky her!

Pinon Coffee said...

You know, I'm not _really_ up on international children's lit, but I definitely agree with you--linguistic fun and elsewise. :-)

Yes! I think she had a lovely trip. You should ask her about it sometime.