A hilarious story in which words are the material of a literary game. A green worm ('ver vert') with odd-colored eyes decides one day to go to Versailles to meet the King. Alas, the worm makes a blunder by calling the Sun King Vercingetorix. From there everything goes wrong, and they try to put the green worm under lock and key... In this picture book, Bruno Gibert indulges in one of his favorite pastimes, the Oulipian constraint, which here requires the recurrence of the sound 'ver' in a nonsense story. The text makes the homophones spring out in green, while the pictures, in which the grotesque unfolds in careful settings, play hide-and-seek between the reader and the worm. If the book's first effect is to make us laugh at the expense of a silly worm, it also encourages children to try semantic and lexical acrobatics themselves.
Book in French. ★
