When Jack was little he used to fall asleep sucking to restrain his ear.
Azir is a small toy made of towel cloth, and it got its name because Jack had a hard time pronouncing the word "pig" at the time.
His name was later changed to "Merzir", and he accompanied the introverted and lonely echo boy, the protagonist of JK Rowling's new book, to any place and in any situation, comforted him when his parents divorced and greeted him when he returned from school on the first day.
Until on Christmas Eve, during a family quarrel in the car, Holly, Jack's step-sister, threw him out the window onto the highway, "then the wind snatched him away and he disappeared from sight."
"Jack and the Christmas Pig" is Rowling's first book for children, since the seven volumes of "Harry Potter" and the storm that erupted in the world of literature almost 25 years ago.
During these years, the British writer managed (among other things) to say goodbye to her mythological character as a tormented writer who scribbles her ideas on napkins in a cafe, where she hides from the cold, becomes a billionaire, publishes thrillers under a fake male name and provokes outrage over transphobic statements.
Despite all this baggage, her new children’s book has been hailed with applause in the English-speaking world, but is far from recreating the charm and charm that characterized her writing in the beginning.
In choosing the plot, time frame and place, Rowling went for sure.
Just as the "Harry Potter" series was built according to the traditional model of British boarding schools - which always has a kind-hearted orphaned hero, a rich, arrogant and vicious child and also a crucial encounter on the sports field, where the protagonist saves the situation against all odds - so "c. K and Christmas Pig "recreates familiar fairy tales.
In these legends the toys come to life, and the protagonist embarks on a journey in a parallel reality, where he discovers for himself qualities he did not know, which allow him to return to a routine life when he is corrected and confident.
It would not have been so terrible, had not Rowling's version of the familiar legend been so faded and dripping.
After losing Marzir, Jack receives from Holly, the tormented conscientious nurse, a new piglet, a piglet, who reveals to him that at Christmas they can go to a lost land, and there, lost, they will surely find his beloved Marzir.
So far the plot of the book is gradually evolving and is interesting.
Jack has to deal with very dramatic changes in his life, and his emotional states are described gently and wisely.
His attachment to the tattered piglet - a faint scent of his mother's perfume, so he loves to hug her so much that he falls asleep - is also touching.
But from the moment Jack and the Piglet set out on their journey, the story becomes strenuous, condensed and completely uninteresting.
Rowling invents more and more characters, but these are not surprising or amusing: the two inspectors at the entrance to Lost Land are perforated and forked.
The first opens and closes his mouth and tiny circles of paper fly out of it, and the second cruelly stabs those standing in line.
Happiness, on the other hand, is a lady who spreads intense heat, and as expected - no one will find her, because humans are always looking in the wrong places.
Jack and Hazir migrate between the districts of a lost land, bearing names such as "bar-substitute", "of-where-is-this", "desert of oblivion", "perceived-lost city", etc., depending on the status of the objects and concepts within them.
For there are lost that there are still those who seek them, there are things that no one cares about anymore and there are those who have been lost, and their human beings belonged to have a hard time overcoming the loss.
In any such place, Rowling does not miss an opportunity to preach.
She portrays human beings as greedy, greedy and worthless (the values, the values of a businessman who pursued money but is not happy, are indeed hidden in a lost land), whose selfishness overflowed until it seeped down, creating the "loser", the non-ruler of the evil place That the same Jack must defeat in order to change himself and the world.
This is the place to stop and salute the translator, Gili Bar-Hillel Samu, who, once again, had to deal with sentences full of puns, and as usual did so with great talent. When Rowling, for example, allows Jack to confuse the terms Recycling and Cycling because of the similarities between them, Bar-Hillel Samu (who had no available and simple Hebrew equivalent) writes that Mom says recycling brings objects to their new incarnation, And Jack peeks into the trap hoping to see them roll. What a beauty of a solution, indicative of verbal attention and sensitivity that transcends verbal inventions, that since "Harry Potter" we all know she excels at.
Rowling describes the loser as someone who has breathlessness in the smell of landfills all over the world, plus battery acid and burnt rubber - and not by chance, because she harnesses the story to talk about the climate crisis.
The subject is important, but its treatment of it is appallingly didactic.
The result is a story that takes itself too seriously, and is therefore disappointing.
Besides, the story of a land of loss squeaks from the beginning, because we have long known what happens to objects that disappear from us - the "takers" take them.
Mary Norton revealed this to us in her 1952 book, which was so entertaining, exciting and thrilling that after the TV series even the great Miyazaki made a movie out of it.
Jay. K.. Rowling / Jack and the Christmas Pig, from English: Gili Bar-Hillel Samu. Yedioth Books / Attic Books, 326 pages