Jackets Required: Bowl of Cherries

By Fwis -- Publishers Weekly, 10/16/2007 3:00:00 AM

This is the latest installment in a weekly column by Fwis, a graphic design group that blogs on book jacket design. The Fwis designers judge a recent book by its cover each week on PublishersWeekly.com.

Title: Bowl of Cherries

Designer: Eli Horowitz

Illustrator: Jason Holley

Author: Millard Kaufman

Publisher: McSweeney's

The cover of Bowl of Cherries, the first novel by Millard Kaufman, comes across as funny, bright, a little confusing, and strangely old-fashioned. Though the illustration of a pair of ghostly monuments crafted from drippy mud implies symbolism, the illustrator is playing it fairly straight. Bowl of Cherries is the story of 14-year-old Judd Breslau, a prisoner in the town of Coproliabad, Iraq, where the local industry is a concrete made of human “evacuative biodegradables.” From this cell, Judd tells how he chased his love from America to imminent execution by “ganching” (being flung from a tower onto a pit of sharpened bamboo spikes).

There’s a bit of Yossarian, Holden Caulfield and even L’Étranger’s Meursault in the young protagonist, which makes all the more sense when you learn that Kaufman, a “budding newcomer” to the literary scene, is a contemporary of Vonnegut, Heller and Camus. Best known for his cartoon creation Mr. Magoo (as well as a pair of Oscar-nominated screenplays), Kaufman is 90 years old.

Thus the perfection of this cover: despite the utter surreality of the illustration, it wouldn’t look out of place on our grandparents’ bookshelf next to their copy of Catch-22, making it an excellent treatment for a 1960s satirical classic that happened to get published half a century later.