Book Club

THE PRICIPLES OF UNCERTAINTY
by Maira Kalman

In an uncertain world, a gifted artist offers a quirky but no less recognisable view of what we can’t fail to see.

When Maira Kalman’s Principles of Uncertainty first appeared, at the start of 2008, the world was a different place.

Lehman Brothers was still a good few months away from declaring bankruptcy. The tectonic plates that would lead to the sixth largest earthquake in the world since 1900 had yet to complete their slide beneath Japan, and the parts of Britain that still cared were plucking  ’will he, won’t he?’ petals from the royal daffodil that was the Will and Kate show. No one would ever believe that in less than a year’s time, America would be swearing in its first black president, much less that one day the euro would flounder with the Liberal Democrats in the (shared) front bench.

But stuff happens, and most of us learn not just to deal but to live with it. One of America’s best loved illustrators, the New-York based Kalman shows us -- in a series of seemingly random musings, beautifully rendered cartoons and drawings -- what she does in a year where life’s meaning is questioned on a daily basis. One of the first mysteries posed involves the nature of optimism, or for those with a more religious bent, hope: ‘How are we all so brave as to take step after step? Day after day? How are we so optimistic, so careful not to trip and yet do trip and then get up and say O.K. Why do I feel so sorry for everyone and so proud?’

The approach is surreal, whimsical, existential. Happiness and relief arrive in the form of music, the love of family and friends, a box of (Laduree) chocolates, a ‘celebratory wake-up room service’ perched on a pink Paris bed, even an exuberant British fruit platter and a series of ‘walking backs’. Kalman’s ‘characters’ (caricatures?) make you occupy the same space, almost, as you did when as a child you dreamt of meeting Ludwig Bermelman’s Madeline (and Pepito) in ‘the old house in Paris that was covered in vines’.

Lehman Brothers did not take down everything with it; Japan is stoic as ever and will no doubt emerge stronger from any natural disaster; Will and Kate are now the happily married Duke and Duchess of Cambridge. We have yet to know the outcome of the euro debacle and Barack Obama may struggle for a second term. Who knows what will happen? In the meantime, Kalman’s advice on the last page of this delicious tome is an accurate depiction of the famous World War II poster that still rings so true: ‘Keep calm and carry on’.

Principles of Uncertainty by Maira Kalman (Penguin Press, 2007) is available in hardback on Amazon.com.