J’attends* Davide Cali and Serge Bloch!

Leia entrevista em português.

When I started as a trainee at Barca in 2007, I read J’attends... and fell in love with the book. This year, when I got L’ennemi in my hands and realized that no one has written about that equally captivating book, my fingers started to itch. Once those books were written and illustrated by the same artists, I take a chance to introduce them both to you.

Davide Cali is an Italian writer, born in Switzerland, Serge Bloch, a French illustrator. Together they’ve published L’ennemi (in Brazil, by Cosac Naify, 2008) and J’attends... (in Brazil, also by Cosac Naify, 2007). In a partnership that uses a few simple words and lines, these artists transmit to us many strong messages, which are sensitive and important.

Let’s take as “beginning” and “ending”, the front and back covers of the book. So here’s the tip: as images are also readable, L’ennemi is a book that must be read from the beginning to the end. Using very accessible yet touching words, Davide brings us a bit of the slashing cold that a soldier feels in a battlefield. War is a very complex subject, specially, when it involves kids. The little ones, pure hearted, see no meaning in war. They don’t understand the fear that surrounds them, the instability, the hunger and the absence of their parents. For those who know innocence and love, war is nonsense. But in this book war makes sense. At least for these soldiers.

They are two. One on each side of the trenches. Enemies. The nice soldier goes through hunger and fear, he misses his family and grieves because he can’t get out of there, after all, the other one, devil on Earth, would kill hill. The enemy is evil. He kills innocent children, has no love or mercy in his heart. Has no family. He’s read everything about his enemy on the manual. But, suddenly, gifted by loneliness, despair and yearning take fear’s and insecurity’s place. So when the nice soldier realizes that the other soldier is a human being just like him, who loves and yearns and, oh yes, has a family, he understands that the war must end. He recovers innocence, realizes that he has been misled by his superiors, that he fights and kills and dies a little every day because of a war that isn’t his own, a war that, like a child, he doesn’t understand. A war between human beings who have families and feel hunger and loneliness. Who have a heart.

Along with this plot are the kind and puerile illustrations by Serge, which show us how the Sky can be even bigger when the stars are the only companion that a person can have. The battlefield is a cold, lonely place and it makes us reflect – or go mad.

Being a book where text and illustrations complement each other, J’attends... also presents us with a fragile subject: life. Flirting with the metaphore that life is a line, Serge uses a piece of red wool along the book, sometimes short, sometimes, long. Of immeasurable subtlety, the book rivets us to the details of the short text and the delicate illustrations, but lets us wander in the blank spaces. “Carpe diem” enters kids’ lives through this book. From childhood to deathbed, going through adolescence and wedding, it brings perspectives of what awaits children in a few years, and, who knows, makes them – like it makes us, adults – wish to live through what we’ve already lived, again. Like my parents said, when they read the book: “Wow, that’s the way it is!”.

And that’s why “J’attends” for more and more books by this more than dynamic duo. To check out more delicious art : www.sergebloch.com and www.davidecali.com

Or read our interview with writer Davide Cali.

Barca: Davide, you write about the tough reality in such a sweet way for kids, preparing them for life** and allowing lots of them to find their own social reality in a book. Is this intentional or it just happens? Where do you conceive your ideas? In the streets, taking a walk or do you really work hard on the subjects to describe them so specifically?

Davide: When I started to write for children I did it just thinking that I could tell them whatever I wanted. There’s no subject too hard for them.

My first books where funny but in each one there was at the same time a “strong” subject. In A papa sur mesure the little girl protagonist of the story hasn’t got a father.  In Je veux une maman robot a kid who his mother leaves alone at home to go to work decide to build by himself a new mom, a robot-mom.

Moi, j’attends was the first book different form others I already did. More serious, more philosophical. The book came by itself. I was at the post office because I had to send a letter. There was a lot to wait, so I started to think to all the times you have to wait something during life. At home I wrote just a simple list of things. Then understood that this was a book, and that I wanted to tell something about the sense of life. I needed to do this in that period but I had the right perception of this only when the book was finished.

When I wrote L’Ennemi I just wanted to tell something about the war and the media’s manipulation which gives us everyday an enemy to fight against. It’s a serious book and I wanted to do that since the beginning.

About where my stories come from: I still didn’t understand it exactly. At first I was used to look for my stories, but now are stories to look for me. Stories come to me often when I travel, because when I’m at home I have to much work to do, so my mind has got always many things to think to. When I’m on a plane, I haven’t work to do, nobody can reach me by e-mail or telephone, I just think to anything. That’s the moment in which stories find me. It’s true that in all my stories theirs is something real, something about our life, our world, but the way to tell them, the “engine” of the story came to me by itself. Then starts another part of the work: to make up the story for the publisher, in the right format, number of pages for an album, etc. This is the hardest part of the work. Sometimes I write down a story in 20 minutes and then it takes 3years to be finally ready to be printed in a book. It’s also for this that I usually work on many stories, about 10, at the same time.

Barca: Writing for kids is actually a hard task. Did you decide you’d write for kids, or did it just happen, you discovered yourself as a good author for them?

Davide: It just happened. At first I was a cartoonist and I just wanted to do this for all my life. I knew quite well the children’s books because during my civil service (I did it instead of the service in the Army) I worked in a library specialized in children’s books, but I never thought to do, me too, books for kids.

Then, I visited an exposition with a selection of the best French books for children and I understood that I already was an author for children. Many stories I had in my mind, which were no good for comics but were anyway written and illustrated, were books for children.

Barca: I’ve checked your website and I’ve noticed that you’re a cartoonist, am I wrong? But I didn’t find any books that you’ve written and illustrated yourself. Why don’t you illustrate your own books?

Davide: I started to work as cartoonist in 1994. I was 22 years old and Linus, the most important comics monthly magazine in Italy (*) found interesting my work. I worked for the magazine, writing and drawing, doing comics, strips, illustration and covers, for 14 years, until summer 2008. Meanwhile I started to publish my books. The first appeared in 2000. I illustrated my first four books. Then an Italian publisher asked to me if I could just write him a story. It was a project for which he had already an illustrator. At first I didn’t know if accept, then I decided to try. A few years later I start to be so demanded as writer that I had to leave the illustrations to others. I haven’t enough time to do everything.

Anyway I illustrated a little book in 2008, published in Argentina for Pequeño Editor. It’s titled Spaghetti, and is a little quite strange book, illustrated with black ink and real Italian spaghettis. It was nice to do it.

(*) And the last one still in life after the 80’s. During the 80’s there was full of comics magazines, at the beginning of ’90 the crisis and a new generation of young comics’ readers who preferred Japanese manga and American superheroes comics, drove the magazines to close all.

Barca: How do you pick the artists who will illustrate your books? Are they your friends, people who share your ideas, or is it simply the editor who refers them to you? Do you participate of the creative process with the illustrator, or do you leave them free to create images of what you’ve written?

Davide: At first I tried to realize my projects with an illustrator but this doesn’t work easily. Often the publishers liked just the text or the pictures but not the both things. It worked well only with Anna Laura Cantone.

The others illustrators I worked with are proposed by the publisher but I always can accept or not. Anyway I take part to the work: I give the story with a complete illustrated storyboard.

Illustrators can choose to follow it or not, but often they do it.

For Moi, j’attends I gave a storyboard to Serge but then he did something completely different. He’s great. He followed the storyboard I did for L’ennemi but for our third book together, J’aime t’embrasser, I just wrote a text.

With others illustrator I took part to their work and they did the same with mine, asking me to change little things in the text or giving me suggestion about it.

The collaboration with some illustrator worked so well that the publisher now asks to me new books especially for them. This happened in Italy wit Evelyn Daviddi and in France with Anna Laura Cantone, Eric Heliot and Serge Bloch.

Barca: Davide, how do you see the presence of reading among children and youngsters in your country? [Note: Davide lives in Italy nowadays]

Davide: Very bad. Italy is a country full of culture but this is culture of the past. It’s true that Italy produced, and produce also today, many genius in art or literature or cinema, but common people hasn’t got very interest in culture and books in general.

So I prefer to work in France. I’m also tying to publish directly in Usa and Japan.

Barca: Thanks a lot for your attention and kindness. Any words to the readers of Barca dos Livros and Brazil?

Davide: Thanks to you. I’m happy to be published in Brazil. My books in 2008 arrived in Australia too, so now I’m translated in all the five continents.

Many countries and many different people. I hope one day to can visit them all, Brazil too.

*I wait for

**from Davide Cali, we also have at Barca, “A dad who measures up”, which is about a girl who doesn’t know her farther, and wants to pick one who fits her needs.