Stories

Alex has written at least 700 books.  The last one is 350 pages long.  That is the easy information to give you!  Now for the more complicated information:

I think it is true to say that most of her books use an existing published book or DVD as her starting point.  Some of the texts are copied almost exactly, perhaps with the names changed but most are modified slightly or considerably.  Her Ice Age 3 is largely unrecognisable as the Ice Age 3 she has on DVD.  When she wrote Ice Age 3 she played a DVD player and kept pausing so she could write her version.  The text and the pictures are usually very different indeed.

Another complication! She loves writing in different languages. She writes fairly fluently in English and Hungarian her father and mother tongues but then she is capable of copying pages and pages of Spanish or Italian or German of Slovakian and also of inventing what is effectively ‘jibberish’.  All very confusing!

The first story of Little Town Mouse is in Hungarian…not copied…the individual words are usually OK but the grammatical changes to words and the sentence constructions are often not correct.

Ice Age 3.  I have chosen the last few pages of this mighty book.  They are in English.  They are astonishing to me.  The imagery and the poetry is superb.  The last page called, ‘Vuk’s Song’ is particularly amazing.  Vuk is a well known story for children in Hungary…and certainly not in the original Ice Age 3.  What an inventive delight in words!  James Joyce would have taken off his hat…he would have been rendered speechless!

Because Vuk’s Song is so powerful I really demanded from Alex if it was from her head or from a book or the DVD.  Alex took me to YouTube and showed me Sid and his song which is about Ice Age 3.  It is entirely in German which Alex does not understand although she thinks she does. Alex’s text must be entirely from her mind although, ‘fish stick’, is derived from a picture of a fish skeleton on a stick in the YouTube song.

You can find the two stories by clicking on Stories on the menu bar above and they will scroll down below the word, Stories.

Johnny Town Mouse

Ice Age 3