Find the Duck – Claudia Zeff (Illustrated by Stephen Cartright)

Before I start this, I have to tell you that I have just decided to read a book called Gateway to Atlantis: The Search For the Source of a Lost Civilisation.  The only reason I chose to read it is because the first two words on the back cover are ‘Learned and erudite’.  Comment leavers of the last post will find that half amusing I am sure, anyway, on with the post…

One Christmas I received this work of art and let me tell you it kept me entertained for minutes. Fifteen actually due to my short-sighted, colour blind, (with all the depth perception of a blindfolded cyclops) eyes.

Humiliation and excuses aside, this is one epic book…if you are three.  To find the duck, ‘The’ duck, not one of the thousands of impostors but the original one.

It’s great to indulge in being a child all over again but there is perhaps too much in the way of regression in this book to entice you. Look deeper though, into the powerful subtext.  Just like Where’s Wally? this book poses that existential question of, who am I?

Aside from the question, how does finding a mallard aid us in such a huge life inquiry, you may also be wondering if a bump or fall has afflicted the head of your adventurous reviewer.  well to the second question, I answer you by sitting atop a traffic cone and saying ‘bibble’.

To the first, I would argue, however tenuously (yet tenaciously), that to find the duck is to, by extension, find yourself and achieve enlightenment, a sense of satisfaction and most importantly a sense of inner peace.  I am sometimes amazed that this is not the holy book of a recently founded religion.

When the question ‘where is the duck?’ is asked, the question may as well be how big is infinite and what do aliens look like, the real ones, not those made up ones that people are always seeing.  An enigma entwined deeply in a riddle, to say the least.  Perhaps the question can only truly be answered on a material level, such as *SPOILERS* he’s on the shelf, he’s partially under a towel *SPOILERS END, but on a spiritual level the complex equations of labyrinthine proportions are just to heady for me.

Such dilemmas are personal and unique to us all but if you have an excuse, say a three year old, buy it so you can contemplate the wonders of life and everything in existence and all that entails.  Considering its weighty  and influential ideas that will (possibly) cause a major rethink into the way we view the whole of Philosophy, this book is actually wasted on children.