Book of Questions: Selections
I firmly believe that great picture books are for everyone, regardless of what age you might be. Truly exceptional picture books are works of art, and this translation of Pablo Neruda’s Book of Questions is one of the best examples of this ideal I have ever encountered. Valdivia and Paulson have transformed Neruda’s text, considered to be his last great work of poetry before his death, into a breathtaking landscape of visual poems. The vibrant illustrations perfectly reflect the questions on every page, each one profound in its playful simplicity. On a mountainscape against a rich cerulean sky: “Who shouted for joy / when the color blue was born?” Beneath waves swirling into a shell, teeming with fish the size of ships: “And could it be that the earth / is briefly borrowing the sea? / Won’t we have to return it, / with its tides, to the moon?” The book invites you to dive in and explore its depths with fold-out pages, which reveal extended illustrations and hidden questions. For example, a seemingly peaceful hillside folds out to reveal an erupting volcano and a massive, scowling feline, stretched out beneath the words, “How many questions are in a cat?”
At its core, Book of Questions is a stunning meditation on the importance of curiosity. Neruda’s text and Valdivia’s illustrations urge us to look closely at the world around us, and to never assume we know the why, the what, or the how of Earth’s many wonders. In a time when the answers to nearly every query we can think of are quite literally at our fingertips, this book encourages us to push our boats out into the darkness of the unknown, to swim in the mystery of a question without one clear answer, or any answer at all. As the Editor’s Note states,
“These questions—playful, dancing, mysterious, paradoxical, and nourished by a radical lack of certainty—are all unanswerable. In a gracious and meaningful gesture, what Neruda shares with us as an old man isn’t an arrival at Truth, but the astonishing freedom of a curious mind that dares us to reimagine the world again and again.”
May we all be so lucky to live our lives like Neruda: insatiably curious, for the rest of our days.