eat me

Yet as Will Brooker points out in this revealing though somewhat scattershot study, Lewis Carroll and Alice possess dual identities in the popular imagination. Carroll, or rather Charles L. Dodgson, is the eccentric, shy and stammering Oxford don with a kind heart, a flair for mathematical and linguistic puzzles and an old bachelor's prissy affection for children. That's the traditional view and, to my mind, still largely the true one.

But some modern readers and critics take Dodgson as little better than a pedophile, a depraved Humbert Humbert who proposed marriage to 11-year-old Alice Liddell (model and inspiration for the fictional Alice) and snakily convinced mothers to allow him to photograph their pubescent daughters in risqué poses, or even in the nude. Similarly, Alice has been portrayed as both a polite, strong-minded but essentially innocent and well brought-up young lady -- and as a proto-Goth, with a taste for drugs and danger, half Lolita, half Lara Croft. Somehow these conflicting images co-exist in our minds these days, and Alice's Adventures aims to examine how this is possible and what it means.

Con eso de que los cuentos estan como superdemoda, nos cae un nuevo ensayo sobre las dos alicias y su misterioso creador, el reverendo Charles L. Dodgson aka Lewis Carroll. Como todo el mundo sabe, yo siempre estoy superafavor de que se hagan libros, colecciones, ediciones online, sociedades y todo lo que haga falta sobre Carroll y Alicia. El Washington Post tambien; por eso le dedica una reseña, de la que hemos robado estas lineas.

Aprovecho para recordarles que visiten el universo paralelo de Alice.