So I was actually hoping to find music by Oren Lavie, but stumbled upon The Bear Who Wasn’t There instead, which I found kind of poetic: the Bear certainly wasn’t there in my mind as an option when I went on my virtual walk through the Fabulous Forest that is our Clean new Catalogue that has not relied on Cards for a very long time*.

Growing from an Itch (that I suppose materialized out of… Nowhere? Or There?), this Bear – a very happy, nice and handsome bear, if the note in the pocket that the Bear himself only just discovers he has is anything to go by – is on a mission to find himself. Is he a happy bear? a nice bear? a handsome bear? At least we know from the start that he is a Bear with a Pocket (and a Mission).

Along the way, we meet the curious and – as Alice might say – curiouser inhabitants of the Fabulous Forest (all delightfully alliterated with matching personalities to boot!): the Lazy Lizard lazes about on top of the Convenient Cow, couched in the grass; the Penultimate Penguin polices what the Bear is and is not allowed to think (because the Penguin himself has already taken Everything, not leaving even Nothing for the Bear); and the Turtle Taxi who taxes himself out going to and fro, thinking someone has called for a Taxi (and so the Bear, who we discover is nice, decides to call the Turtle Taxi in order to go somewhere that is apparently quite a popular destination: Forward).

Curiously, the Bear who wasn’t There is more There throughout the entire book than the Bird atop his head, only visible as an outline: is the Bird, who is never quite addressed or given a name, a figment of the Bear’s imagination, or is the Bird every bit as There as the Bear, who wasn’t, before he was?** The illustrations by Wolf Erlbruch are an absolute joy: the clumsy – shall I say, burly? – figure of the Bear chimes perfectly with the narration and his character, and the lush Forest is every bit as Fabulous as advertised. This meander through the Wonderful Woods that are the Fabulous Forest with the Bear who wasn’t There (although he is, now!) is a charming adventure in the Slippery beast that is Semantics, which I now heartily and wholeheartedly recommend to adults and children alike!

If you liked The Bear Who Wasn’t There (or you’re waiting for it, because there’s a queue, and you’d like something else in the meanwhile), here are a couple of items you might also like:

1. (Alice in Wonderland was first on the list, but in terms of nonsense verse, which The Bear Who Wasn’t There isn’t, let me make clear, I don’t think anyone can top Edward Gorey on my list): The Epiplectic Bicycle
2. Old Possum’s Book of Practical Cats by T.S. Eliot
3. Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass (the novels)
4. Alice in Wonderland (the movies)
5. Lewis Carroll‘s The Walrus and the Carpenter
6. Wolf Erlbruch’s other book, Duck, Death and the Tulip

*Which similarly grows when I’m not looking. The more I see, the less I realize I must know, much as the Bear jotted down. It has also not escaped my notice that I’m trying a little too hard to alliterate just about everything in this post.

**Perhaps the both of them are equally not, as figments of the Itch’s imagination? The Imaginative Itch, perhaps?