Read with Matthias, and even though some of the language was a bit sophisticated for him, it was so fun to do this one together as a bedtime read…especially with it taking place in Golden Gate Park—I mean, in a massive fictitious city park that just happens to have an archery range, windmill, bison, and be situated next to the beach.
Beautiful themes of identity and home and freedom and, like seriously, how dumb are the ducks, anyway?
And you have to appreciate protagonist Johannes’ observations of various human-created annoyances (p.85):
Then a truck appeared. It was the size of a delivery truck, the kind that sometimes passed through the park to drop off human food at the snack bar. It stopped at the driveway, turned around, and backed down the sloping drive slowly, letting out a high-pitched sound all the way. And here I should say that of all the horrible things humans have created, the most maniacal and wrong of them all is this, this intermittent screaming sound as their vehicles go backward. All of life stops when the screaming begins. All beauty ends, clouds cleave, hearts break, and all of the world nearby waits, with breath held, for the sound to end. Nothing can be done during this mechanical wailing. No thinking, no eating, no running, no living.
We laughed our way through it all—Ha ha hoooooo!
— ᴘ. ᴍ. ʙ.
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