About this deal
Here, in this short picture book, Michael Rosen writes about sad, about faking emotions and about living with grief and sadness as he walks through life. Sad means go somewhere, call your doctor, get a prescription or something, just go away with that nasty business. Anyone who can contrive a title as interesting as The Ballad of the Sad Cafe deserves a special prize. We put it in our list of best titles, someplace between For Whom the Bell Tolls and Joe, The Wounded Tennis Player. Curiosity was rewarded for The Ballad of the Sad Café is a fine and sensitive piece of writing.
He mentions his second son, Eddie, who died of meningitis aged 18 and how it has left a void never to be filled again. As I was reading this book, I was awaiting the news of my father's passing, which came two days later. The anxiety and the heartbreak that is illustrated in this book is something I found very relatable. Losing my father, who was only 77 and in good health, with no warning at all, is my first encounter with raw grief of someone very close. I never had to face close bereavement in childhood: I lost my grandparents in my twenties and beyond: all reached a good age, ending with a period of decline. Nor did I have to help my own child through bereavement when small. Because I’m not him!” Rosen says. “So you try not to be burdened?” I ask. “Or not to be a burden?” “Both, actually,” he says. “I guess I have sad thoughts every day. But I try not to be overcome by them.” In our life, all of us have probably gone through some situations where we had to pretend that we are happy though life was beating us down. We had to put a smile on our faces so that no one could understand what was actually going on inside. Because “All the world’s a stage….”The Sadness, loosely inspired by Garth Ennis’ Crossed comic series, follows a young couple in Taiwan, Jim (Berant Zhu) and Kat (Regina Lei). Jim drops Kat off at work just hours before a zombie(ish) outbreak that leaves them searching for each other amid the chaos. These infected aren’t traditional zombies. Jabbaz substitutes something more gruesome: His highly contagious virus, which shares similarities to rabies, cause victims to act out their most sadistic impulses. They have no shame and no power to stop themselves — and they give in to their horrifying urges with wide, unwavering grins on their faces.
In Getting Better, Rosen implies that coping is an everyday practice – we are coping even when we are unaware we are coping, and perhaps especially in those moments. Partway through our conversation I ask Rosen, “How have you coped?” hoping he might share some strategies, though he misunderstands the question. In Getting Better, Rosen describes the moment he discovered a photograph of a baby boy sitting on his mother’s knee. When he asked his father who the boy was, Rosen or his older brother, Brian, his father said neither – that it was a third son, Alan, who had died as an infant, before Rosen was born. Rosen was 10 at the time. Nobody in his family had spoken of Alan previously, there were no photographs of him in the house. And though Rosen’s father, Harold, mentioned Alan from time to time over the course of his life, Rosen never spoke about him with his mother, Connie. And so goes another strange Southern Gothic tale by Carson McCullers. Bizarre as this plot line might seem, the story was made into a stage play by noted playwright Edward Albee (1963). It starts with a very funny Quentin Blake picture of Michael Rosen, pulling a very funny grin, on his very funny face. Of course, you have to smile too, until you read the words: The whole book is simply written, like that, though it doesn't purport to be poetry (Rosen is a poet) until the end.I've been there, many times. Hope you have not. This very well illustrated book says it all, the smiling and pretending to be happy, the anger of them leaving, the memories, the photograph books, wanting to speak to them or about them to others that are gone too....or just wanting to keep it all private....and scream! The Ballad of the Sad Caféby Carson McCullerswas first published in 1951. The original book (shown at right) included, in addition to the title novella, Carson’s other major works of fiction. In later editions, the title novella is presented with six short stories, as follows: I notice on Rosen’s desk an unframed photograph of a young man. Rosen swivels to look. “That’s him,” he says, “not all that long before he died.”