Vivaldi
By Helge Torvund and Mari Kanstad Johnsen
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was born in Norway. He is a psychologist, children’s book writer, poet, essayist, and literary critic.
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was born in Bergen, Norway. She has written and illustrated many picturebooks.
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The New York Review of books in 2019
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8-12
Tyra spends many happy days with her new cat, Vivaldi. But in September Tyra goes back to school where she feels lonely, scared and unhappy. This book is about loneliness, worry and being imperfect. It is about anxiety and lack of compassion. Music, words, noises and art, all mixed up in a very complicated matter called life.
A soft scratching sound.
A soft little paw clawing the cardboard.
How happy a sound can make you.
This is how the book starts, and this is why I picked it for my students. Short, snappy sentences is what we have been exploring this summer. In fiction writing, short sentences express emotions. They can show that the character is angry, anxious, excited, surprised or exhausted. We have been learning about different examples and it is nice to see and guess why Helge chose to use extremely short sentences, sometimes with broken grammar.
We can see how long sentences provide more information and can slow down the pace of the story, but then short sentences intrude and create tension. It is like someone’s heartbeat. You are worried, stressed, anxious - your heart races and words get muddled. You can hear BOOM BOOM BOOM in your head. This is how some og the sentences in this book sound. They are noisy and broken.
When we are worried or confused, our words get mixed up sometimes. I know the feeling of jumping from one thing into another in my thoughts, not being able to focus. Vivaldi is very muddled. When we started reading the book, my students could not figure out who was who in it and what happened first. The book start with the words above and then jumps onto the streets where they meet a kitten. Or should it be the kitten. And then we can see that it happens all the time in the book. You seem to be reading about Tyra being at home with her cat and then the next sentence places her right in the middle of her classroom. You are reading about her enjoying her summer days at Grandma’s in the past,
Dancing and smiling.
They’re good things
that a body can understand.
and the very next sentence says,
Marianne lifts the CD player onto her desk and plugs
it in.
Marianne is her teacher and they are now at school.
The next starts as abruptly as most of them before. It tells us about one of the girls from Tyra’s class talking to her parents.
We need to be sure we are following, we are on the same page.
Vivaldi is a very emotional book that makes you stop and think about human nature.
When it was dark in the house that night and everyone was supposed
to be asleep, Tyra’s father heard Tyra’s mother clear her throat. That’s
when he knew he wouldn’t be able to go to sleep quite yet.
Being together we know so much about our family that even a small gesture in the dark says more than words. We become witnesses of their bedtime conversation. It is so natural that I can see how the woman is manipulating her husband into adopting the kitten. It’s just a tiny detail but such a nugget as we can see that the writer knows what people are like. The outcome was already predetermined and the mother just had to make it happen.
I’ve already said a similar thing before but I love crossover books. As a teacher, I should be always interested and focused. As an adult, I can get bored by books for children, reading for a job hundreds of books a year, day in day out, you need something for yourself in it. And Helge and Mari give it to us. Children might not yet know the concept of manipulation, but we do. It’s like a little gift for an adult reading Vivaldi.
Mari Kanstand Johnsen has made this book even better. I can’t imagine this story without her illustrations. Some of them are very simple and clear but so bang on. Every child knows that kittens can be nasty evil beasts sometimes, but they lovingly tickle your toes in the mornings.
Some of Mari’s illustrations are brilliant visual metaphors. They give the text extra meanings. They add up to the story and encourage children to talk about them. The book just says, Summer was passing. Vivaldi grew big. It’s not funny at all. If anything, it’s sad as Tyra wanted that summer to last longer, she hated the idea of going back to school. This illustration in a way contradicts the whole mood of the story. There’s so much humour in it and it puts smiles on our faces.
Vivaldi is as big and strong as an ox. It is training hard for a competition.
In the beginning, colour confused us. Both Vivaldi and Tyra were constantly changing colour. It’s black, orange, sometimes has patterns and then it’s yellow or blue. In somer of the pictures, Tyra acquires the same colour or shape as something she enjoys. She can be a kitten or a flower. This is what she is like when she enters her space of no words. It’s an escape for her. But why is the cat changing its colour? Is it going along with her? Is it just an artistic style? Is there a deeper meaning to this?
Eyes. Eyes. They are everywhere. Black and brown, round and squinted. Eyes are looking and terrifying her. You can point out to your students if they don’t mention it that all the children in her class don’t have faces. Why is that? I believe they are so faceless because she never actually looks at them. She is so much in her own head that she is only aware that they have eyes. There are more illustrations where children miss faces or even blur into one. See the second picture where a few girls merge together and have only two legs between them.
All eyes on her. Those eyes follow Tyra everywhere and they make her insane and mad. She is so red. Is it anger? Shame? Embarrassment? Danger? Red is a symbol. We just need to find what it will symbolise for us. Every reader is different and they will find something for themselves.
Music is another metaphor in this story. Sometimes we see how it carries her away. She takes off with it, forgets about her troubles and escapes the reality. There is something else though. Music is a symbol. Music is a language. We are all different under the sun. Some of us speak English, others are multilingual and there are people who consider writing, music and any art form a language. Those people deliver messages by drawing them, they can play a few notes and it will say more than a thousand words. A music theme in this story is secondary. It could have been drawing, sculpting or anything else. And it is important to let children know that music in this book is a metaphor. For example, we read a book The Bird Within Me by Sara Lundberg. Her character is a girl whose mum is suffering from tuberculoses. Berta is worried and ‘being a bird’ and painting becomes her escape. For Tyra this escape is in her cat and music.
To know what inspired Tyra and made her happier, we listened to Vivaldi on YouTube.
There is a lot of repetition in this book. It is a literary device where words, phrases, or structural elements are repeated to create emphasis. It can also help writers to build rhythm. Torvund uses this trick on nearly every page.
Look out for examples of metaphors, similes and personification.
She can feel the hard lump.
It’s there when she walks home from school.
There are no words in it.
It’s as if it lay inside
a water bubble. When she
touches the bubble, the water runs from her eyes.
Some characters even speak about themselves as of metaphors. Grandma said she was part tree. How come?
Nonetheless she feels that there’s something about Grandma that is
like the tree. Something safe. Something that’s been here for a long time.
By the way, ‘something safe’ is another example of shortened broken sentences that make the story so intense.
Broken sentences. Broken vases. Broken girls. She is shattered. She is hopeless. It’s not just a vase. If we look closesr, we will see that the pattern is her story, her life and routine but now it’s gone.
I get excited when children see that and when they know that a little detail can mean way more for a story.
While reading, I was thinking about the role of adults in the story. They don’t seem to be emotionally involved. Teachers have never noticed that Tyra is being bullied. Her Art teacher doesn’t find her picture that screams pain particularly interesting, dismisses it and suggests drawing a snowman. Tyra’s parents know about her issues but never do anything about it. The only person who actually does something about it is another child, Petra. The little girl gets worried for Tyra and tells her dad, who straightaway phones the principal, who phones Tyra’s dad.
Nobody is perfect in this story. Every character has a flaw. At first, we were talking about Tyra and we were sorry for her. When my students wanted to criticise Tyra’s classmates I agreed with them. But then all the characters start unravelling and Tyra is not a victim. She never helps herself. Petra wants to be friends but Tyra just won’t talk. Petra is a child and she doesn’t know what to do about this lack of communication. That’s why I wanted my students to see that we shouldn’t blame everyone but Tyra. She gets annoyed when even her mother talks to her. Her mum also seems to be rather frustrated, pushing Tyra into talking.
I think this is important to discuss because it shows the complexity of every character. And while going through all their traits we talk and we engage children and they open up about their life experience.
And we debate. For example, Marianne doesn’t ask Tyra when she puts her hand up. Why? Does she not see her? Does she not expect Tyra to say something? Is she being mean?
Is it all happening at all? Because we couldn’t agree on that with the kids.
I am sure that one of the illustrations is a homage to Wilson Alwyn Bentley, an American photographer who was the first one to take pictures of snowflakes. There is a wonderful Caldecott Medal Winning book Snowflake Bentley about his journey.
Tyra cries. Once she cries a river, or an ocean and both Vivaldis, the kitten and the music one travel in tiny boats across her wet sorrows. She floods everything around her. I like it when Tyra thinks about music. Those pages are always full of language techniques. for example, this bit is about the composer.
His music slept for a hundred years.
What a marvellous example of personification.
There’s also one exciting example of a metaphor.
Her mom is walking beside her, holding her hand.
The sun is shining in the leaves and heather.
There are millions of things the writer could have put in their school yard. Helge though mentions heather. It is a symbol of resistance, resilience and strong will because of its ability to grow in challenging conditions. Heather is also associated with luck. Years ago there were a lot of gypsies travelling around England and they were knocking on people’s doors and trying to sell lucky heather. Some believe that heather offers protection. Tyra needs all that and her mum is just like heather is there for her.
Now it’s nearly the end of the book and I realise that even those things that we think are real are in fact her imagination.
Tyra wants to answer her teacher’s question, she puts her hand up but Marianne never asks her for an answer. I think this is because Tyra is trying to answer only in her head. No way she is standing on the desk, jumping out of her pants. She is thinking it, she is wanting it, she is trying but failing.
Mum and dad tell Tyra she needs to see a psychologist. Ok.
Tyra goes to find Vivaldi.
She stuffs him into a big empty box on the floor.
Vivaldi looks at her in bewilderment. She closes the lid.
It’s completely dark inside.
She can hear him scratching against the cardboard.
He wants to get out.
She pounds her fist against the box.
Vivaldi meows.
Why??? Why is she doing it? Is she hiding him? She isn’t trying to kill hi, is she? Why has he lost his colour and there’s only his outline left like it’s a soul fading away?
Then she comes to see David the psychologist.
Tyra remains silent.
For a long time.
But David doesn’t get impatient or irritated or upset.
He just looks at her.
Tyra answers very softly. And she. begins with a single word:
“Vivaldi.”
And that’s the end. We don’t know what happens next, so we have to discuss it. My students thought the writer had done it to let us pick our own ending. And I also have the right to pick my own. I think Tyra is Vivaldi and he is inside her. Sometimes, she locks him away, sometimes she enjoys having him out.
