I recently read a book called A Mango Shaped Space by Wendy Mass. Initially, it was the word “Mango” which caught my attention – nostalgia for childhood summer days spent eating juicy mangoes….sweet, a little squishy, a wonderful orange-yellow… warnings against over-eating, since it could cause tummy-aches…. The first mango of summer… the excitement and curiosity it engendered: would it be sweet, as in really really sweet? Sometimes the sweetest mangoes had an insect burrowed inside…Ah, mangoes were worth the wait. A short mango season, but what an indulgence!!
By evoking all these memories – “an universe in a tea cup” – the book had a lot to live up to. Having picked it up at random, I had no idea what the book was about. I soon discovered it was all about associations. Specifically, about synesthesia. I had heard about synesthesia, and how synesthetes associated colors with numbers and letters, how sounds provoked visual images. I had, after all, read Baudelaire’s Correspondances. What I knew about it was some information tucked away in the trivia section of my brain. In the book, A Mango Shaped Space, the protagonist is a synesthete who initially tries to keep her condition a secret. An informed doctor helps her understand her condition for what it is, a gift rather than a shameful secret or a dangerous illness. She is in danger of losing herself in her expanded world when a traumatic experience temporarily deprives her of her extended senses, and brings her back to her family and the real world.
Wendy Mass does a fantastic job of making a synesthete’s world seem natural and accessible to her readers. She also brings home how being different is an isolating experience, and while the synesthetes’ world can seem so much more, it does come with a price. While reading the book, I got a glimpse of a world which made my own seem like a 2D version, with the 3D world in living color just beyond my reach.
Historically, a lot of creative people were synesthetes. Some tried to replicate the experience with mind-altering drugs. Two of my favorite poets have written about the synesthetic experience, Rimbaud and Baudelaire. Proustian descriptions of nature seem to have a touch of the synesthetic mélange of senses about them. For Proust, flowers and bushes are more than just themselves, they are people, they are character traits, they are events in themselves.
From Wendy Mass’ to Proust is a long journey indeed, both in time and experience. A Mango Shaped Space is a lot shorter for sure, and a lot easier to read than In Search of Lost Time. I will not ask you to go out and read Proust, but if you get a chance, pick up A Mango Shaped Space. Your child will enjoy it, and so will you.
Wendy Mass’ book for children did a lot more than bring the remembered taste of mangoes to my mouth – it gave me a glimpse of a world I didn’t know, and regretted not knowing.
Hey Pramila – It is Oct…last blog was in June… we need some now…!