The pages in Peter Sis’ new illustrated book aren’t numbered, so I counted them. I didn’t really need an accurate figure — the counting was just an excuse to leaf through the book’s textured pages, which feel something like silken cheesecloth fingerprints. And I mean that in the best possible way.
At 146 pages (OK — so I used the figure after all), The Conference of the Birds is lengthier than any of Sis’ other titles. The celebrated children’s book author, who’s speaking at The Booksmith this Sunday, is usually constrained to page limits determined by a book’s target age group. He’s won Caldecott Honors for his children’s books, including The Wall: Growing Up Behind the Iron Curtain and Starry Messenger: Galileo Galilei, and he’s a six-time winner of The New York Times Book Review Best Illustrated Book of the Year.
When Sis decided to make his first book for adults, he encountered no cap on page number, which he admits made The Conference of the Birds difficult to finish. “I would just paint and paint and paint,” he said. He didn’t change his working process much, which makes sense, because children’s books are already partly designed to please the adult who’s obliged to read the book at bedtime again — and again — and again. If I have kids, I’ll be employing reverse psychology each night to covertly encourage a Conference of the Birds habit.
In its pages, graceful, questing birds are swept into spirals and sorted into grids. They catapult through terrain punctuated by embedded labyrinths. They’re pieced together into monochromatic Rorschach patterns. As Sis’ birds migrate, the illustrations travel along in a hypnotic rhythm of threes — a long view of surrealist mountain topography, the flock’s sinuous passage through new landscape, and desaturated diagrams of amorphous shapes where time goes missing. The rich color, flowing pattern and Sis’ trademark laborious line work are mesmerizing.
Sis, who grew up in Cold War-era Prague and immigrated to the United States in 1984, has been drawing birds as symbols of freedom since he was illustrating album covers in his early days in the U.S. He first illustrated the winged creature Simorgh — who appears in The Conference of the Birds — for Jorge Luis Borges’ The Book of Imaginary Beings.