Daily Iowan

Issue date: 9/28/07 Section: Arts

Personal reasons aside, Sís also believes that too much detail leaves people clueless. "You can't make a book about [hard times], you have to live in them," he said. Making things simpler can spread a message. In Sís' book, the fragility of freedom, especially in a free country where such liberties are taken for granted, permeates the pages.

"It's a cautionary tale about how your life might be very different from what it is now," he said, noting that this book deviates from the rest of his work because it destroys the theme he has built in his other stories: that the world bursts with magic and wonder.

"This is the first book I'm saying life is not all wonderful," he said. "I feel bad about it, but I feel like I have to tell people or they'll forget."

Yet rather than depress audiences, The Wall is more likely to burn an evocative image into readers' memories about the intimate side of communism - one impossible to derive from history books or academic lectures. Crosshatched drawings linger, and the graffiti rainbow of liberation sticks.

Sís' story illuminates communism's dark areas and softens all the hard spots with the textual simplicity of a children's book and the illustrative maturity of art.

E-mail DI reporter Vanessa Veiock at:

vanessa-veiock@uiowa.edu

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