Claudia Kincaid is an overachieving sixth grader who is bored with her routine schooling and dull home life in Greenwich, Connecticut. More than anything, she wants experience and to feel the thrill of knowing important secrets, so she decides to run away to a place full of them - the Metropolitan Museum of Art in Manhattan. She takes her nine-year-old brother Jamie, a poker-playing tightwad, with her, and together they board a train for New York. She writes her parents a letter telling them not to worry, without disclosing her and Jamie's whereabouts, of course.
A Skillful Plan
When Claudia and Jamie get to the museum, they carefully decide how to remain inconspicuous, how much money to spend on food and other necessities, and where to sleep. Claudia finds a musty-smelling but elegant sixteenth-century bed in the English Renaissance hall to sleep in and they both hide their belongings in various places including a sarcophagus. Both crafty and intelligent kids, she and Jamie manage to live in the museum for a week without being caught once, even though they take risks like bathing in the restaurant fountain.
Konigsburg incorporates a lot of witty banter between Jamie and Claudia - for instance, they speak to each other in old-fashioned English - and she also assigns them "adult" habits like doing laundry at the laundromat and drinking coffee. But she doesn't strip them of their childlike essences completely. When Jamie tells Claudia that he has saved up almost twenty-five dollars of his poker money, he neglects to tell her that it's all in change, which makes walking around Manhattan a fairly heavy experience.
The museum has thousands of visitors a day, and Jamie and Claudia easily blend in with crowds of schoolchildren and the general public, even though their pictures are all over the papers. Their parents have been frantic in their absence and did not hesitate to contact authorities.
A scholarly one indeed, Claudia is determined to learn something on her adventure. She decides that she and Jamie should spend a day studying each exhibit. Jamie, who wants the adventure to be less like a school field trip, tries to dissuade her by choosing the Italian Renaissance. He figures that she'll get bored after she realizes that there are too many works of art to study. When they make their way to the Italian Renaissance hall, they discover a giant crowd waiting and a New York Times reporter taking pictures of a statue of an angel.
The Michelangelo Mystery
Claudia, determined to find out why a single statue drew such a large crowd, reads the front page of that day's New York Times and discovers that the Angel statue, which may or may not have been sculpted by the great Michelangelo Buonarroti himself, was sold to the museum by the wealthy widowed art collector, Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, for $225.00. Its authenticity is the subject of great scholarly debate, and Claudia, tired of being unknown, is exhilarated at the prospect of solving a major historical mystery. Jamie is content with the fun of just running away from home, but Claudia, who has discovered a major clue about Angel's authenticity, has become intrigued to the point of near obsession with the statue.
Point of View
Although at a quick glance the novel appears to be told from the points of view of both Claudia and Jamie, it is actually a retrospective novel narrated by Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler that begins with a letter to her lawyer, Saxonberg. (Saxonberg's true identity is revealed at the end of the novel).
After Claudia types up an anonymous letter to the museum giving them information about the statue's clue, she gets one in response saying that the clue has been known for a long time, and that scholars, art critics, and museum curators have painstakingly examined the statue for signs of Michelangelo and have come to no conclusion yet. Claudia feels extremely disappointed but refuses to go back home yet. She and Jamie decide to pay a visit to Mrs. Frankweiler herself.
Mrs. Frankweiler proves to be an engaging narrator and seems to understand the children, especially Claudia, more than most adults do. An eighty-two-year-old eccentric woman seems an unlikely character to tell the story, but Konigsburg, who seems to place a lot of value on individualism, makes the story flow smoothly despite all its plot twists. If the reader forgets that Mrs. Frankweiler is telling the story, they are gently reminded by her notes to Saxonberg in parenthesis.
A narration from an outside observer may lead its readers to question the veracity of the story much like the critics do with the Michelangelo sculpture. But in the end Konigsburg reminds us that one's perception of an event is really all that matters.
Mrs. Frankweiler is impressed by the both the shrewdness and honesty of the children and for a small price, reveals the truth about the Angel statue and tape-records Jamie and Claudia's accounts of their journey. In sharing a major secret with Claudia, she has, in a sense, made her "somebody." Now Claudia can go home a quiet heroine.
More than a lengthy tongue-twister of a title, From The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler is one-part mystery and one part pure imagination. Konigsburg intermingles a broad and colorful vocabulary with a fairly complex and immensely enjoyable plot. Anyone, adult, teenager or child, who wishes to be freed from the monotony of daily life in order to get lost in a world of art and culture should read this imaginative novel.
Konigsburg, E.L. From The Mixed-Up Files Of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, Aladdin Paperbacks 1967, ISBN 0-689-71181-6
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