Book Beat: Peter Sis's Red Box Diaries: A Glimpse of Old Tibet
Heather Vogel Frederick -- 8/17/98
It's funny, the things that stir memories. For Proust, it was pastries. For Czech artist, author and filmmaker Peter Sis, it was a small red box.When his father wrote and offered it to him a few years ago, Sis returned home to Prague to retrieve it with mixed emotions. As a child, he had never been allowed to touch it, and he knew that inside were diaries that recounted a fascinating tale of adventure.
In 1954, Sis's father, a documentary filmmaker, disappeared for nearly a year and a half. Sent to China to teach his craft, he ended up filming the construction of the first road into Tibet and was stranded with a few colleagues when a mountain wall collapsed, separating them from the work crew. Forced to trek onward without a map, he eventually made it to Lhasa, where he met the Dalai Lama, then just a boy.
"My father documented on film for the last time what Tibet looked like before the world got there," Sis said.
His father also kept diaries of his journey, which he smuggled back into Czechoslovakia ("This was the coldest time of the Cold War," explained Sis) and placed in the red box. Sis was enthralled with his tales of the remote mountain kingdom.
Confronted now both with the contents of the red box and his father's mortality -- the elder Sis informed his son that he was battling cancer, which has since gone into remission -- Sis twined his own childhood memories with his father's story to create Tibet: Through the Red Box (Farrar, Straus &Giroux, Nov.). It's a very personal book, one that is "as much about finding his father as it is about discovering what went on during those years in Tibet," said Frances Foster, Sis's longtime editor and publisher of Frances Foster Books at FSG.
This is a departure of sorts for the acclaimed picture book artist, whose most recent title, Starry Messenger (FSG, 1997), a pictorial biography of Galileo, won a Caldecott Honor, though it will not be marketed primarily to children. "We're pitching it to an adult market," said Foster, who nevertheless expects the book to have strong crossover appeal.
A first printing of 50,000 copies is planned, and German and French editions are in the works. Sis is slated for a six-city author tour, and artwork from his book will be exhibited at Tibet House in New York in November.
Childhood is not unfamiliar territory for Sis. Born in Czechoslovakia in 1949, he was granted political asylum by the United States in 1982 and charted memories of his Prague youth in Three Golden Keys (Doubleday, 1994), one of the last books that Jacqueline Onassis edited. Still, he found Tibet particularly challenging as an artist.
"How do you paint this?" asked Sis. "How do you visualize something you've never seen and just imagined, through someone you love very much?"
An artist whose subtle, multilayered pen-and-wash illustrations have graced both picture books and such magazines as Atlantic Monthly, Newsweek and the New York Times Book Review, Sis eventually chose a central visual theme of circular Tibetan mandalas elaborated with symbols pertinent to the story and mazes ("to create a feeling of search, for my father and for Tibet"), along with a repetitive palette of red, green and blue, the symbolic Tibetan colors for fire, earth and water.
Like all good stories, this one came full circle several weeks ago when Sis traveled to Switzerland to meet the Dalai Lama, and presented him with an inscribed copy of the book wrapped in the very friendship scarf the monk had presented to his father at their meeting half a lifetime ago.
"He remembered my father!" said Sis, a touch of boyish awe in his voice. "It was amazing."
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