Iva Sasheva - Of Books & Long Tails

A bookstore on Chicago’s North Side, a veritable labyrinth of books, connects the main characters – Eloise the mouse and Percival the rat. Eloise is constantly reading, sitting on Ray Bradbury’s sofa. She chooses books according to the day and her mood: children’s books, books about the stars and the universe, or human anatomy. In the attic, Percival, the “shellshocked rat,” repairs clocks. A note he leaves on the floor in the Novels section sets this story in motion, but Eloise the mouse is quite hesitant about its genre. With a classic watercolour technique, Iva Sasheva builds a cinematic system of points of view, in which she navigates so convincingly that she makes the reader a close-up witness of the action and inner dilemmas of the characters. Though the book belongs to the picture book genre, it contains a great deal of silent cinema. Nikolai Grozni’s text is embedded in the illustration, working in the same dramaturgical time. The two characters are truly alive among the giant objects in their multi-story book world. This illustrated book is elitist in the best sense of the word, and not just because we see books by Freud, Joyce, and Nabokov drawn in the library.