Summary:
“There is something peculiar about this book: the fact is the cover gives it away right from the start.” That was the first line of Walter Benjamin’s review of The Fairy Tale and the Present written by Alois Jalkotzy in 1930. Benjamin excoriated that author for diluting the fairy tale, once replete with evil step-mothers, murderers, and drunks, into a saleable commodity made of bland pieties suited for “children.”
No such charge can be made against Zazu Dreams. Its cover pulls no punches. In the foreground, a young man, Zazu, holds his malamute husky, Cocomiso, atop their friend, a humpback whale. In the background is a tableau of the contemporary grotesque. On the right, sewers vomit effluent into the sea. On the left, chimneys belch noxious fumes into the night air. Between these man-made geysers, a red moon hangs: low, fat, ominous. Zazu Dreams is not for the helicoptered and the coddled, those sensitive to micro-aggressions and in need of trigger warnings. Zazu Dreams is an unvarnished fairy tale in which the comforting is enfolded within the scary and the beautiful is braided into the ugly. Zazu dreams in images, in words, in philosophical musings, and in historical forays. Zazu dreams to awaken us from our slumbers.
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