Through the Looking-Glass

Really enjoyed this return trip with Alice, and most especially struck this time by the clever, unexpected, and humorous twists that Carroll takes with unexamined everyday turns of phrase. Also forgot how eerily dreamlike (and authentically trippy) this book is.

Alice dreams a creative, witty mirror-world behind the looking-glass, where nursery rhymes come to life, scenes and creatures shapeshift, phrases are taken literally, mad ideas, puzzles and silly poetry abound. But. While Alice herself is charming and considerate, everyone she encounters is self-absorbed, mad, and often mean. They constantly interrupt, lecture, patronize her, put her down, correct her, talk at her. I felt like I was in a suffocating nightmare. Despite the brilliance of the word-play, I could not wait for it to end.

Lewis Carroll’s ‘Through The Looking Glass’ was first published over one hundred years ago and is a classic in children’s literature. In essence, it is about the struggle of childhood.
In Alice’s dream there are symbolisms of the constraints on childhood and what one must go through in order to become an adult. Along the way there is practically nothing that she herself does in order to move the story along – everything is presented to her without much option, just like in childhood. She touches a goat’s beard and finds herself sitting under a tree. A fawn will only tell her something if she walks farther into the woods with it. Alice wonders which fingerpost to follow, yet there is only one road.
Near the beginning of the show more story, she is trying to leave her ‘house’ and get to the top of a ‘hill’, representing the initial struggle.
“So young a child,’ said the gentleman… (he was dressed in white paper), ‘ought to know which way she’s going…” is an example that signifies that the innocence of childhood precedes the decision of goals one must choose for their adult livelihood.
When Alice decides she wants to be Queen, the White Knight, representing purity and goodness, says “I’ll see you safe to the end of the wood…” meaning that if she is pure and good, she will make it through childhood. He also gives her the wise counsel, “The great art of riding…is to keep your balance properly,” meaning that if she continues with moderation in life she will be successful.
At the end, she stands before an arched doorway over which the words ‘Queen Alice’ are written, the arch representing the graduation from child to adult. As an adult she finds her voice and challenges the Red Queen (authority) by demanding that pudding be brought back to the table. Then she “conquered her shyness by a great effort and cut a slice…” and hands it to the Queen. By doing this, Alice is showing that she has become her own person.
This is one of the few older children's classics that I would actually read to a child because it does have good moral lessons in an entertaining environment. The original illustrations are really great. Highly recommended! show less

Through the Looking Glass is a bit of a disappointment after the first book. Alice's Adventures in Wonderland had plot progression and consequences for Alice's actions ('Drink Me', etc.). In this book, we just skip between scenes with no connection between them – Alice is just lifted from one and transplanted to the next by magic. (This is meant to mirror pawns moving across a chess game but the theme is rather obtuse.) In contrast to the warmly whimsical first book, Through the Looking Glass often seems to be clever for the sake of being clever, rather than clever for the sake of being entertaining and amusing. Nevertheless, this book did give us the poems 'Jabberwocky' and 'The Walrus and the Carpenter', and Carroll's is a show more pleasingly strange and interesting mind to rove in for a time. show less

I feel that I have already read both Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass and simply forgotten. The introduction to my Bantam Classic copy provides the background of how the books came to be written from stories told to the actual Alice and her sisters, greatly enhancing the reading experience because you can picture it in the structure of both books. It also contains the original illustrations.

Where Alice comes across primarily as a whimsical tale told in reaction to the surrounding scenery and the reactions of the girls as Carroll entertained them on a Sunday afternoon, Through the Looking Glass feels embedded with life lessons as Alice makes her way across an imaginary landscape, overcoming various tests and show more tribulations (much like growing up). The physical representations of the fording of streams within the narrative feels particularly like goals accomplished and rewards given.

Both books succeed because of the obvious interplay between two worlds, with Alice the child unintendedly displaying her limited understanding of the rules and manners of the adult world through the illogical, ironical characters she meets. The tyrannical Red Queen. The ever-late White Rabbit. Tweedledee and Tweedledum and their long tale "The Walrus and the Carpenter," who graciously take all the young oysters out for a walk and a talk; only in the poem's final sentence do we learn that the gallant heroes have actually "eaten every one" (an admonition, perhaps, not to trust seemingly helpful adults?). My favorite chapter, "The Lion and the Unicorn," relates Alice's interactions with the King as he incessantly takes Alice's words literally. When she tells him she sees nobody on the road, he is envious of her vision to see an actual Nobody who is out of the King's range. When his messenger tells him nobody is faster than he, the King contradicts him, saying that obviously Nobody is not swifter, else he would already have arrived with the message.

While the jacket blurb implies deeper meanings hidden within Alice—"a satire on language [and] political allegory"—I think the entire story is simply an educated man's amusement told to a friend's daughters, influenced and embellished by his adult awareness of the gap between his world and theirs.

* - I have posted the same review for each book, seeing how, for me at least, it is difficult to separate the two or read only one. show less

Kids’ books: they don’t write ‘em like this anymore, if in fact they ever did.

I know that this is supposed to be a kind of mirror-image response to [b:Alice's Adventures in Wonderland|6324090|Alice's Adventures in Wonderland |Lewis Carroll|http://ecx.images-amazon.com/images/I/5115L4ICn6L._SL75_.jpg|2933712], but I found it decidedly trippier. Where Alice kept a fairly consistent tone throughout, this book constantly goes in and out of focus: one moment, things are more or less lucid (yet still absurd, of course), very much in the style of Alice. Then the next moment, the reader is plunged into the queasy uncritical miasma of the last seconds of a dream; or further yet, into slippery madness logic reminiscent of a mushroom trip. show more It's a much more extreme experience.

While constant changes in size and proportion played the most prominent role in lending Alice in Wonderland its dreamy feel, in Through the Looking-Glass the surrealism comes chiefly from manipulation of distance and movement. Any time Alice tries to go somewhere, the resulting narration takes on a blurred, unreliable feel; Alice is thinking of getting out of her present situation, or moving towards some objective, and suddenly the walls of reality melt and shift. Very much like a dream in that way, where certain images and scenes are ultra-vivid, but it’s hard to pinpoint exactly how you got from one to the next.

This was a fascinating book, one I’m sure I will read again. And having read both books recently for the first time as an adult, I'm going to say that this book is better than Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, if only by a nose. Read Alice first, then pick this up for sure. show less

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!

I really enjoyed this...nonsensical and lyrical, it's almost better than Wonderland. There are many funny moments in the book and my favorite bits are those where Alice keeps trying to avoid having poetry recited to her and failing miserably. She's always rather sad at having to listen to yet another poem, particularly when they don't make a lot of sense to her. And I was rather horrified (spoiler) by the Walrus and the Carpenter verses when I got to the end...what villainous behavior. Still, I like this bit very much:

"The time has come," the Walrus said,
"To talk of many things:
Of shoes--and ships--and sealing-wax--
Of cabbages--and kings--
And why the sea is boiling hot--
And whether pigs have wings."