Alan Ruff - The Invention of Hugo Cabret

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“The Invention of Hugo Cabret” by Brian Selznick is the fictional account of a young boy living in the walls of a 1930’s train station in Paris, France.  Hugo, the son of a deceased watchmaker, has gone to live with his disappearing uncle and has the responsibility of keeping the clocks on time throughout the station.  He has recovered a broken automaton from the museum fire that killed his father in the hopes that it will have a message for him.  Hugo steals parts to fix the automaton from a toy shop within the station until he is caught by the shop owner.  Hugo’s relationship with the shop owner is further complicated when he is forced to turn over a notebook given to him by his father before his death.  It is later revealed that the toy shop owner is the original inventor of the automaton; and he is also a famous filmmaker who has gone into hiding.
                As with most young adult literature, one of the major themes in this book is self-discovery.  Hugo is an orphan who is trying to find his place in the world.  Hugo seeks to continue the work of his uncle and his watch-making father by fixing machines and keeping them running.  Machines are made for a purpose and every gear or piece in a machine has a specific function.  And if we aren’t being used for our purpose, then we are no different than a machine that has broken and needs to be repaired.   Hugo uses this reasoning to propel him on his search for answers.  “I like to imagine that the world is one big machine. You know, machines never have any extra parts. They have the exact number and type of parts they need. So I figure if the entire world is a big machine, I have to be here for some reason. And that means you have to be here for some reason, too.”    

                Selznick structures the book into two separate parts.  In part One of the story he gives the reader all of the pieces of the puzzle without making it clear how they fit together.   We are introduced to different characters and images without the full understanding of how they are connected. This is very similar to Hugo’s story.  He has all of the pieces he needs to find the answers that he’s seeking.  He just need to figure out how they all fit and work together.  In Part Two of the story, we see how the pieces begin to come together until they are fully intertwined and become a part of the whole.  This idea of trying to figure out how the pieces fit and work together is also accomplished in the format of the book.  There are 526 pages in the book with almost 300 of them being illustrations.  The illustrations are an integral part of the story that must be read even more closely than the text at some points.  Neither the illustrations or the text are able to stand alone and tell the complete story.  It’s how they work together that bring the story to life.

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