Eric Carle pays tribute to surrealism in new book

NEW YORK — Eric Carle, the 85-year-old author of the children’s classic The Very Hungry Caterpillar, has announced that his next book, called The Nonsense Show, will be a silly tribute to surrealism.

The book, which will be published by Penguin Young Readers Philomel in October, will combine verbal and visual jokes to provide “something downright preposterous”. The Nonsense Show is the final part of a trilogy of Carle’s homages to art, along with The Artist Who Painted A Blue Horse and Friends. Surrealism was an avant-garde movement that arose after World War I and included practitioners such as Salvador Dali and Man Ray, among others. Carle is a big fan of the surrealist art of Pablo Picasso.

Carle was born in Syracuse, New York, in 1929, the son of a German immigrant. The family returned to Germany and Carle grew up there during World War II. His father, who had taught the boy to draw, was taken prisoner to a camp in the Soviet Union and died after spending years in and out of sanatoriums.

Carle returned to the United States in 1952 and his first children’s picture book was Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?, followed by 1,2,3 To The Zoo and The Very Hungry Caterpillar. In the years since, he has created more than 100 picture books, which have been translated into 40 languages. His work is celebrated in The Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art in Amherst, Massachusetts.

The author discovered he had an unexpected fan in former US President George W Bush, who nominated The Very Hungry Caterpillar as his favourite story when he was a child. The anecdote appealed to Carle’s sense of the surreal because Mr Bush was 24 when the book first came out. AGENCIES