The Lost Thing [Lost & Found]

Image from shauntan.net

The Lost Thing is one of three books included in Tan’s omnibus titled Lost & Found. In a faceless metropolis filled with brutalist architecture and steampunk machinery, a young bottlecap-collecting enthusiast befriends a wayward bio-mechanical being. Several times taller than a man, with a pair of large grasping appendages, it walks on six tentacular legs and has an unknown number of other tentacles which emerge from doors on the deep red potbelly-stove-like shell surrounding its body. Although the lost thing is ignored by most, the protagonist tries to help it find its place in the world, eventually turning to the Federal Department of Odds & Ends (motto: “Sweepus Underum Carpetae”) for help.Warned off of accepting the FDOE’s assistance by a helpful kindred spirit, the boy and the thing are led to a place where the towering red whatsit can be itself, if not exactly fit in. Tan’s detailed paintings make extensive use of yellows and shadows to depict both the passage of time and the story’s tone as the days pass in the surreal city. Large images are arranged in composed openings with notebook clippings of narration and tiny paintings of the thing’s puffs of vapor. While the boxes of text and paintings are each bound by a rough, browned border, the illustration is in fact full-bleed, with the background of each page filled in by a monochromatic, age-yellowed collage of technical drawings and text which sometimes compliments the words and art, but usually creates on the page the sort of background noise common to city life. While young readers may appreciate the tale of a misfit finding a place to thrive, their parents will find a narrative recalling what it’s like to more easily see the wonders in the workaday world.

• The Lost Thing [Lost & Found] by Shaun Tan; illus. by the author
• Intermediate
• Arthur A. Levine Books
• 128 pp.
• Published 2011
• ISBN 978-0545229241
• $21.99