Portuguese / Portugal
A guerra
(War)
Letria, José Jorge
(text)
Letria, André
(illus.)
Lisboa: Pato Lógico, 2018. – [60] p.
ISBN 978-989-99658-8-1
War | Picture book
Reading age: 9+
White Ravens issue: 2018
The text and illustrations in this book could be read independently of one another. Yet both are literally and figuratively dark. The two realms touch and mingle at several points, however, forming a magnificent whole. José Jorge Letria’s text is a sequence of individual aphoristic sentences, which all begin formulaically with the words “The war…” and each of which stands alone on a double-page spread. These sentences reflect timeless, profound, compelling, and powerful thoughts and images about the causes of war, its character, its power, its ramifications, and its close ties to human beings. André Letria has wisely not tried to illustrate each sentence. Instead, he uses brush and watercolour to create sombre, breath-taking, unsettling pictures in foggy grey tones, which all on their own can be read as a wordless book. They tell of a shadowy world, which war penetrates like smoke and permeates all, a world that is ultimately destroyed by a human-made machinery of war.