The Great Petrowski: An Illustrated Fable [Hardcover]

In the very first paragraph of Gina Berriault's fable, "The Great Petrowski," we are told that her Amazonian parrot hero, Petrowski, "probably had not yet found what he was looking for." The book's 80 pages visit particular forms of questing and guidance, beautifully presented with the author's often bemused and always gracious wonderment. What author James Hillman has termed "In Search of Character and Calling," seems to me to be the subject of "The Great Petrowski." Petrowski follows his destiny in much the same way that Gina Berriault assuredly followed her destiny everywhere in her writing of this fable. Her writing itself could here serve as guidance in the art of writing. Keeping her genre in hand, she loves to play: with alliteration, as in "skyward sounds," itself a high order of sounds, and with childlike rhyme, as "On the backs of twelve yaks." She regularly shows us this parrot's world though this parrot's eyes: We hear him "strutting through rain puddles on the flat roofs," we sense "him settling in for the night." Keep an open eye for these bird images; they abound, as in the Opera Director's "feathery white hair," his "swallow-tail coat." Take pause, as well, to meditate a while upon Ms. Berriault's attendant illustrations. Music, the spirit's voice made audible-is here sung in the operatic tenor voice of Petrowski, a parrot, bird of many voices. The Opera Director, in tune with this bird's capacious attributes, and with an eye always on perfection, says to Petrowski, "Please, I beg of you. Sing only the tenor and nobody else." Music enheartens this entire book. You'll hear music in its language, music in its meaning. Running parallel with music is the essential reminder that we live "in times of great crises." Quite soon after Petrowski rediscovered his homeland, our now increasingly dispirited Brazilian rainforest, "A child began to cry." That cry deep within us all. The Profit Motive, as is its inclination, has come doggedly to wound our world. Will our planet even survive? Our very act of breathing is at stake. When Petrowski, in quest of spiritual guidance, climbs into the Himalayas where the air, though thin, remains pure, the Opera Director pauses to reflect: "I wonder. . .if air sounds like bells in all the little chambers of our lungs." Ultimately, Petrowski prophesies a day when "The Destroyers won't dare to blast or drill or saw or dig anymore." Gina Berriault has bestowed on us a fable, a parable of hope. How could her book be otherwise, threaded so intricately through as it is with her humor and insight and wisdom and wonder? However oft she herself might at intervals have doubted it, she brims with hope-Petrowski is her offering: "And how beautiful he was, this bird whose whole body was pulsing with song." On the book's very last page we read, "A curtain of clouds was lifting and the whole sky was a stage," this stage upon which the universal spirit comes to perform for us each and all. Those who knew Gina knew her spirit. Those who did not know her may come to know her spirit through reading this, the last book she was to write. This book pulses with song.

The story shows clearly, at both the metaphoric and plot levels, that individuals make a difference, that fame and fortune aren't measures of success, and that art is as necessary to us as the air we breathe.