The Waiting Dog

Mima Vulovic is a sessional lecturer at York University who also works
at the Ontario Ministry of the Attorney General.

The Waiting Dog, a collaboration of two brilliant siblings, is the
delicious, succulent product of a radical sensibility. Carolyn Beck’s
text combines the gruesome horror of Grimm Brothers, the nonsensical
verse of Lear, and the absurdist twists of Russian avant-garde
children’s writers such as Kharms and Vvedensky. Andrea Beck’s
acrylics are similarly dense, macabre, wacky, and strongly reminiscent
of some German Expressionists.

According to the cover, the first time Carolyn Beck narrated the tale
of the waiting dog at a family dinner, she had everyone in stitches.
Undoubtedly, the effect would be the same in any good Greenwich Village
comedy club, for this is a Seinfeld kind of fantasy: the protagonist dog
dreams of devouring a postman! In such a morbid detail, Freud himself
would kill for it: “I’d suck a sinus, chomp a cheek / But when I got
a peek ... / At that spewing, spitting, hissing, fissure / Your
phlegm-hacking / Up-chucking (mmmmmm) / Lip-smacking kisser, / I’d
spin right in and gobble away at the spicy bits of brown and gray / And
green wedged between your dirty thirty-twos.” Although the book’s
target audience is readers eight and up, I suspect most three-year-olds
would absolutely love and giggle silly at the music of rhyme and images.


This is Carolyn’s first book; Andrea is the author and illustrator of
the Elliot Moose series. We are lucky that both sisters still live and
work in Southern Ontario. Paris or Berlin may snatch them yet. Highly
recommended.