Innocence and Experience in the Batchelder Books

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INNOCENCE AND EXPERIENCE IN THE BATCHELDER BOOKS What sort of world do recent continental European writers visualize in the books they are writing for children ? Is it as varied in tone and attitude as that we have come to expect from British and American books for young people? We can get some answers to these questions from the European award-winners collectively known as the Batchelder books. The Mildred L. Batchelder Award is given each year by the Children's Services Division of the American Library Association to the United States publisher of the most outstanding children's book originally put out in a foreign language in another country and subsequently published in the United States. First presented in 1968, the award has been given twelve times, twice for a picture book, once for non-fiction, and nine times for fiction. Of the books of fiction, two are clearly fantasy, two are adventure stories set in the present, one is a problem story also set in the present, and four, two of them war stories, may be classed as historical fiction, since they deal with actual historical events or attempt to give a solid sense of a past period and its concerns. Although the final choices for the awards have been made by Americans , the Batchelders are among the best of the foreign publications for young readers. They can be taken as examples of the kind of writing that is being done for children and young people in Europe. By examining them, we can gain insights into what continental writers for children have on their minds and think their reading audience would be interested in. Taken together, they reveal the world view contemporary authors on the continent are offering to the young in the books they are writing for them. In this discussion of the setting and atmosphere of the Batchelder winners, only the long works of fiction will be considered. With respect to attitude toward life, the nine award novels can be divided into three sets. In some of the books, the world is essentially a good place where evil is superficial and easily dealt with. Problems are only mildly troublesome, and the reader is never much bothered about whether or not the protagonists will win through. In the second group of books, the difficulties the main charac- ters face are a good deal more serious. They may be an intrinsic part of the makeup of the leading characters, or they may be societal problems of long standing, but they can be resolved through the acquisition of knowledge or the application of courage and daring. In the third set of books, the view of the world is much darker and bleaker. In them, one is buffeted by fate and at the mercy of those who are powerful and in control of things, people whose motives may be irrational or stem from self-interest, ambition , and greed. Although there is hope for survival, the good life results more from luck or an accident of birth than from what the individual can accomplish through his or her own efforts. In these books, evil seems more pervasive and less easily confronted. Falling into the first set of books are Pulga, The Leopard , The Little Man, and Konrad . The lightest ¿T^these are the last two. Konrad , an inventive fantasy by Viennese Christine NostlingerT Ts~ a comic satire on contemporary family life. The Ideal Child factory mistakenly places a little boy programmed to perfection in the single-parent home of a non-conformist , bohemian mother. To keep him from being repossessed by his manufacturers, Konrad' s school chum, Kitty, and his straight-laced, stand-in father help his mother reeducate him for naughtiness. The little blue men whose responsibility it is to reclaim their misplaced product can hardly be taken seriously as villains since they are so easily foiled by the combined efforts of this engaging set of eccentrics. Konrad' s misattempts to function in a world in which most children are far from being models of good deportment provide much overt humor, and the reversal of the normal parent-child relationship is amusing to contemplate . Although there is much didacticism in Konrad...