He recognizes with some strange alarm the drawings in Hugo’s notebook, and refuses to return it. The toymaker also has a secret, a terrible memory he wants to leave behind. He is working to repair it using the parts from the toyshop animals, hoping that it will write a note to “save his life.” This automaton, the only inheritance from Hugo’s watchmaker father, is Hugo’s great secret: a writing robot. The young thief is caught and forced to show an old toymaker his precious notebook, drawings for repairing his mechanical man. He is himself a mouse, a secret creature in inhabited spaces, and also mechanical – part of the mechanism of the station – a boy with a function but no life. At the start of the book, he sneaks out to steal a mechanical mouse from a toy store. The orphan boy Hugo endures a lonely and secret life, sleeping in a hidden room in the Paris train station, continuing his departed uncle’s work of tending the station’s 27 clocks from small dark tunnels in the walls. Originally published in Thinking: The Journal of Philosophy for Children 19(2/3): 1. Review of The Invention of Hugo Cabret: A Novel in Words and Pictures by Brian Selznick (New York: Scholastic Press, 2007).
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