![]() ![]() ![]() There is, of course, a reason for Spivet's mapping. ![]() In design, it appeals to the same contemporary nostalgia for the niceties of between-the-war text books and all things Baden-Powell. The result is a wilfully original and diverting book, full of carefully penned ephemera, a bit like Schott's Miscellany written as a confessional novel. ![]() Many of these maps illustrate the margins of his story, along with all sorts of other digressions and diagrams. His co-ordinates are all over the place: he maps the flight paths of bats around his house, the dynamics of his sister shucking corn cobs, the spread of McDonald's in northern Montana, the rising waters of the local lake, which he believes is set to inundate the town. Spivet lives on Coppertop Ranch in the wilds of Montana and it quickly becomes clear that the cartography he is interested in is not the stuff of the Ordnance Survey. To this end, he places us in the head of Tecumseh Sparrow Spivet (TS for short), a 12-year-old prodigy with a compulsion to make maps of the world in order better to understand it. O pening Reif Larsen's The Selected Works of TS Spivet brings to mind that useful old instruction of Mark Twain: "Persons attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot." Larsen wants to transport his reader to something like the world of Huck Finn, that place of adventure where adult codes are suspended. ![]()
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