The Stinky Cheese Man and Other Fairly Stupid Tales
by
Jon Scieszka
Illustrations by Lane Smith
My daughter has had me read this to her every night this week, even though I don't think she's old enough to understand it. I don't know if I really get it either, as its self-reflexive take on classic fairy tales and references to authorship are over the heads of most kids, and I kind of scratch my head at its appeal.
I don't how this book came into our collection, but my wife is a collector of childrens' books (I once bought her an early edition of Alice in Wonderland as a gift) so I am assuming this book is hers. It's a bit too sophisticated for a four year-old. She has other books as well that she's reluctant to let the kids read, especially since my one year old son ripped a page out of her signed copy of Ray Bradbury's Switch on the Night.
My daughter, I think, has a fascination with weirdness that is typical of school age children, and may be ahead of other kids her age in that respect, so that's the current appeal of Stinky Cheese Man. Case in point are the illustrations, which look like something that Ralph Steadman would dream up for a kids' book. Steadman is the guy who illustrated the cover of Pink Floyd's album The Wall, exacting a look somewhere between Monty Python caricature of British Society, Nazi propaganda posters and the paranoia of heroin addiction. Not that the illustrations for this are so grotesque, but they are meant to be caricaturish and whimsical a la Hieronymous Bosch and will elicit comments from my daughter like, "Why does Ducky Lucky have so many eyes?" (Answer, in my head: Because the illustrator is trying to show home crazily shaking his head) or "Why does the giant have a triangle nose?" (Answer: Because he's actually the scarecrow from Wizard of Oz).
The stories themselves are parodies of Chicken Licken, where the sky doesn't fall, but the book's table of contents does, of the Frog Prince, where he just wants to be kissed by the princess, and Jack and the Beanstalk, which doesn't technically get told. Instead the Giant complains that he always gets shafted by the fairly tale before it ever gets off the ground and the book depicts Jack's escape from his clutches by speaking in sentences that get smaller and smaller on the page until the Giant falls asleep.
The parody is a mixed bag. The Little Red Riding Hood parody is called "Little Red Running Shorts" and it tells how the quick running Riding Hood outruns the wolf to Granny's heading the main plot point of the original story off at the pass. So it trails off into absurdity. For kids its clever, but to me it's redundant. The only original story, the Stinky Cheese Man, just shows the aforementioned character as a prankster who tries to get people to chase him for some unspecified reason, but everyone avoids him and his smell until he dies in a river. That's it. Certainly no one can accuse it of plot complication.
I think the book isn't really meant for kids at all. Kids don't understand the concept of meta-narrators and archetypes that would be more appropriate to college class on semiology. What's more, it's cynical. Kids have enough time to be cynical in adolescence, and it's wink-wink, look how controversial sensibility, but it wears thin after the first read. The parody isn't sophisticated enough for me, as an adult, but kids might like being confused and seeing those Bosch-y drawings.
But despite my initial reaction, there is much to like about the book. It's very witty at points. I liked the Princess and the Bowling Ball story, a take on the princess and the pea. The prince in the story is a little peeved that his parents have put such exacting standards on his potential mates, and is frustrated because none fit the bill of being able to sense a pea under 100 mattresses. So he puts a bowling ball under the sleeping princess he really wants so that there is no way she can fail the test. The mashup of stories where Cinderella meets Rumplestilskin is also worth a chuckle.
I just wish I was kid sometimes, back to when weirdness was, you know, weird.
