Throwback Thursday: Nicholas
Just for a second, try to remember the kinds of gifts that you hoped to unwrap on Christmas morning when you were twelve years old. Odds are that you were probably expecting some kind of toy, maybe some sports equipment or art supplies. At that point in my young life, I was probably dreaming of finding a cleverly concealed skateboard under the tree, but, looking back on that holiday many years ago, I have quite a different idea of the best gift I received that year.
Not many twelve year-olds would love to receive a book for Christmas, really. Especially not when it was carefully wrapped and ribboned in such a way as to disguise it as any other small, rectangular package (I probably rushed to it excitedly, thinking it was a video game). But I still remember unwrapping Nicholas (or Le Petit Nicholas in its untranslated, native French) by Rene Goscinny and Jean-Jacques Sempe and being intrigued by it, as it was unlike any book that I had seen up to that point. The book is a manila-colored hardcover, bereft of any decoration except for its title, the name of its authors, and a small drawing of its titular character.
However, as the saying implies, judging a book by its cover usually doesn’t lead to very favorable results, and Nicholas is no exception. Between the plain, wool-textured (seriously, you have to feel this book) covers, it holds the story of a young French schoolboy and his adventures in his rigorous preparatory school, where he and his mischievous friends constantly cause problems for their teachers and principal. Nicholas usually means well, or at least doesn’t intend on causing trouble, but it seems to be drawn to him.
As a boy of around Nicholas’ age, I was enthralled by his hijinks, and read through the entire book the same day I received it, and several times afterward. This certainly wasn’t because I could relate to the pint-sized troublemaker, as I was more or less his opposite. I’d never (and would never be) been sent to the principal’s office. Furthermore, I had definitely never been caught stealing my father’s cigars after getting sick from their pungent smoke (this was my favorite of Nicholas’ self-created disasters, and I don’t think my dad has ever even thought about a cigar). The book served as a type of escapism for younger me, as I imagined having the type of minimally destructive fun that my teachers and parents would hopefully never find out about.
Nicholas, along with two of its five sequels, in their deep red and blue covers, still has a proud place on my bookshelf, which is something that I might not have predicted when a slightly disappointed twelve year-old version of myself unwrapped it on Christmas morning several years ago. As this formerly mild-mannered suburban kid will attest, Nicholas’ stories prove that the desire to cause mischief, or at least to live vicariously through the antics of someone who does (even if they’re fictional), exists in the back of most minds.
