Kay Chronister’s latest novel, THE BOG WIFE, is about five siblings in West Virginia who unearth long-buried secrets when the supernatural bargain entwining their fate with their ancestral land is suddenly ruptured. In her holiday blog post, Kay fondly recalls receiving as a Christmas gift an updated and revised edition of the beloved 1977 bestseller, GNOMES, an illustrated survey of gnome life, history and lore. Read on to find out what fascinated her about the book as both an avid reader of fantasy novels and a graduate student studying literature.
I am sorry to say that I don’t remember who gave me GNOMES. My mom said that she had a copy as a child in the ’70s, but my copy came to me brand-new and pristine on Christmas circa 2004. If it was you, please let me know. I loved the book.
GNOMES --- originally written in Dutch and titled LEVEN EN WERKEN VAN DE KABOUTER, or LIFE AND WORK OF THE GNOMES --- is a faux-field guide to the bearded little mystical persons said to live in the forests of Scandinavia. It is a big, lush, heavy book with painterly, precise illustrations. I remember pictures of a toadstool house with an orderly and a well-stocked kitchen. I also recall, vividly, two portraits of gnomes standing naked to show their anatomy, which scandalized and enthralled me. Alongside all these illustrations were erudite, playful discussions of gnome biology and society, gnome households and gnome marriage rites, and the slow devastation of the gnomes’ natural habitat by human beings.
At the time, the playfulness went over my head a little. I knew, obviously, that gnomes were not real, and I was also dimly aware that the authors --- writer Wil Huygen and illustrator Rien Poortvliet --- probably knew gnomes were not real, so I knew that I was reading fiction and the authors had knowingly written fiction. Yet the book committed so wholeheartedly to its conceit that I found myself doubting. The captions on the illustrations were done in a handwriting-y scrawl that appeared to have been lettered with real ink, and Huygen and Poortvliet had a knack for coming up with details. Did you know, for instance, that gnomes always give birth to twins? Or that they gather hair from deer to knit their underwear and stockings?
I was an avid reader of fantasy when I received GNOMES, and I assume that’s why someone gifted it to me. I loved the Redwall books, and I had recently battled my way through THE HOBBIT and The Lord of the Rings trilogy. GNOMES shared those books’ patience with the art of worldbuilding, their eye for detail and their anthropology of an imaginary society. But I think what I loved most about it was the hoaxishness of it. I knew the book was fiction, yet it did not ever admit to being fiction. It tried cheekily to convince me that it was a real history.
Huygen and Poortvliet spoke of a persuasively specific lineage of gnome scholarship, referring to a book by an unreliable 16th-century scholar. They took their subjects seriously enough that I could not have said when or how they were winking at the reader, even if I guessed they probably weren’t really trying to fool me. When I read it, I willingly fooled myself, if only for a little while. Reading it was temporarily escaping into a world where gnomes were not only real but legitimate objects of scientific study.
Later, I would go to graduate school and learn about frame narratives, the reality effect and literary hoaxes. But GNOMES taught me everything I needed to know about the pleasure of lying to your reader with a straight face and a twinkle in one eye. It seems appropriate to me now that I don’t know who gave me the book. When I went to write this post, I asked my mom to look in the front cover to see if the gift-giver had left an inscription there for me. We found a signature in fat red scrawl on the inner cover page. “I don’t know that name,” she said. “Who is that?” “I think it’s fake,” I said, squinting at the picture texted to me. “Just part of the conceit.” Neither of us was certain.
