Washington Irving's Rip Van Winkle

An adaptation of Washington Irving's classic fantasy set in the Catskill Mountains of eighteenth-century New York about a man who slept for twenty years to find a much-changed world

Kindergarten-Grade 6 Don't be misled by the title, this Rip Van Winkle is emphatically not Washington Irving's. It is a debasement, not an abridgement, of the original: every felicity of Irving's prose is lost, his telling details dropped, new incidents pointlessly invented, and all the larger meanings of the story sacrificed. No longer is the tale connected to the growth of the nation's identity and self-consciousness: it has dwindled to the ghost-story component of its former self. Although the skeleton of Irving's plot remains, hardly a phrase has been left unaltered. The language of this adaptation is impoverished, banal, and anachronistic (at one point Rip, passing an afternoon at the inn, is described as ``soon feeling mellow''). Readers who turn to the pictures will hardly be consoled. If Locker is a landscape painter, he is certainly no history painter. Irving's careful specifications of dress have been largely ignored. Knowing readers will look in vain for some sensitivity to historical costume to help them distinguish the explorers' past (Hudson's crew), the colonial present (Rip's own time), and the revolutionary future (the Republic of his awakening). Not all the pyrotechnics of Locker's sunsets and foliage, the atmospheric views, or the painterly ``quotations'' (e.g., of Gifford's famous Kauterskill double falls) can make up for this sad travesty of an American classic. Patricia Dooley, University of Washington, Seattle
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Locker comes a set of paintings that, like The Boy Who Held Back the Sea , elegantly recall old Dutch masters. Rip Van Winkle, of course, is enchanted by the brew he drinks with a band of men playing ninepins in the Catskills, sleeps, and wakes up to find that he is an old man and the world has gone on without him. The telling succeeds in stressing Rip's idleness around his own house while doing good works for others, Dame Van Winkle's constant harping and the mystery surrounding the mountain men, said to be Henry Hudson's crew. However, most of the humor of the story has been stricken from this version, and the interaction of charactersnotably in two successive illustrations regarding Dame Van Winkleis passed over in favor of more posed events. Locker, who has often placed the people of his pictures as tiny figures on vast landscapes, focuses on the human aspects of the story, yet sweepingly captures the majesty of the mountains. A quiet beauty permeates this book, to be appreciated by thoughtful readers. All ages.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.