I arrogantly recommend… is a monthly column of unusual, overlooked, ephemeral, small press, comics, and books in translation reviews by our friend, bibliophile, and retired ceiling tile inspector Tom Bowden, who tells us, “This platform allows me to exponentially increase the number of people reached who have no use for such things.”
Links are provided to our Bookshop.org affiliate page, our Backroom gallery page, or the book’s publisher. Bookshop.org is an alternative to Amazon that benefits indie bookstores nationwide. If you notice titles unavailable online, please call and we’ll try to help. Read more arrogantly recommended reviews at: i arrogantly recommend…
Nicked
M.T. Anderson
Pantheon
“We all want to sin. It is the only way we have of knowing the full measure of creation.”—Nicephorus
Imagine Monty Python and the Holy Grail meets The Raiders of the Lost Ark, with the historical accuracy and acid wit of the former and the pacing and thrills of the latter, in a quest to find the remains of Saint Nicholas. Nicked is a Santa story for the ages, the tale of the liberation (i.e., theft) of Saint Nicholas’s oozing bones in 1087 from his tomb in Myra, the Seljuks (Turkey now, on the Mediterranean coast) to Bari, a coastal town in what is now Italy.
Beginning in apostrophic tones akin to epic poetry, the narration’s formal rhetorical register is soon brought to Monty-Pythonesque levels when Bari’s Duke finds his excuse to bring the saint’s relics to Bari in a forced interpretation of a humble monk’s dream about St. Nicholas. The monk, Nicephorus, understands the dream as one impelling the clergy to minister to the local populace, which is suffering an attack of pox, rather than keeping themselves locked away from harm. (Nicked seems to be a novel born of the pandemic.) The Duke chooses to interpret the dream otherwise: Other cities, like Rome, have their holy relics, which bring in loads of money from tourists. Isn’t it Bari’s turn? To help the Duke realize this goal, he hires a saint hunter named Tyun, clearly a charlatan—but a charismatic one—whose tales that accompany each relic whose theft he retails are what churches really buy and in turn sell to tourists.
As with M. T. Anderson’s other novels, Nicked as a strong moral core, here in the form of Nicephorus. Unlike Anderson’s books for young adults, however, in which the morality of a teen or tween protagonist is tested—these are young people dawning to the realization of adult duplicity and whose notions of right and wrong are still developing—Nicephorus’s morality is fully formed and set. His is not a sanctimonious morality but Kierkegaardian: He does the moral thing reflexively, out of blind faith, rather than because it’s part of a checklist he can submit to St. Peter at the end of his life. Nicephorus’s opposite is the amoral Tyun, who, realizing there is no situation in which Nicephorus will lie, even if a lie would save his life, tells him, If you must tell the truth, say it in Latin, a language no one around them can understand.
There is action, a sea battle, plot twists, duplicity, betrayals—and love. Unlike many action stories, Anderson, unsurprisingly, gives us a story in which characters are transformed by their pursuits and what they thought they were after—transformed honestly, never in mawkish, sentimental ways. The last thing a good Santa story needs is tinkling bells from angels. The narration is brisk, the prose peppered with irony and historical verisimilitude.
An elderly woman named Musarat serves as the crew’s cook, boiling up one gastro-atrocity after another to a rightfully unappreciative galley. Grunting is her primary form of communication when she deigns to communicate, and we’re told that her presence there owes to having once saved Tyun’s life, as unlikely as that seems. But about mid-way through the book, we see wherein her skills lie, as she saves not only her own life but the lives of Nicephorus and another old crew member, Tornik, when threatened by Turkish soldiers who are looking for the three of them:
She scolded the soldier: “Child: what are you doing? Threatening and old woman and her husband. Do not dare hold that sword toward me. Do not dare. Your mother is weeping.”
. . .
The soldier apologized: “It is our task to keep the peace.”
“So you will murder an old man and woman with your sword and your bow? In the name of peace? I have just heard your father disown you. I have heard him say your name and spit on the ground.”
Strongly recommended, no matter what your faith (or lack of) is. For parents who have bought other of Anderson’s books for their kids, be warned: The language here is at times saltier than his YA books.
The Edge of the Alphabet
Janet Frame
Fitzcarraldo Editions
Now I, Thora Pattern (who lives at the edge of the alphabet where words like plants either grow poisonous tall and hollow about the rusted knives and empty drums of meaning, or, like people exposed to a deathly weather, shed their fleshy confusion and show luminous, knitted with force and permanence), now I walk day and night among the leavings of people, places and moments.
Perhaps because she came from New Zealand, Janet Frame (1924-2004) never became the Famous Novelist she should have been north of the equator. Her sense of language was that of a malleable medium, pliant, given to twisting, with high tensile strength. She had acute insights into human behavior and was empathetic to even the most tiresome of people, but ready with a vial of acidic wit as burning as Margaret Atwood’s. If Frame is famous for anything north of the equator, it is for Jane Campion’s film of Frame’s autobiography, An Angel at My Table, in which Frame—institutionalized for years after a misdiagnosis of schizophrenia—is only just spared a lobotomy when her doctor, listening to the morning radio on the day of her scheduled surgery, hears that she has won a prestigious national writing award, presumably along the lines of a Pulitzer Prize. The surgery was cancelled, her diagnosis retracted, her freedom granted, and her ability to write The Edge of the Alphabet, her third book, made possible.
Edge is narrated by an author named Thora Pattern, who shepherds her trio of protagonists through their misbegotten lives, aged late 30s to early 40s when we first meet them aboard a ship headed from New Zealand to England. Toby Withers—an epileptic, unemployed, and poorly educated New Zealander with dreams of grandeur for the responses he imagines will come upon publication of his book, The Lost Tribe, which he has been thinking of writing, once the conditions are right, since his elementary school days; Pat Keenan—an Irishman from “the real Ireland” returning to England after a tour of New Zealand (probably looking for suitable employment), friendly in his controlling way, frequently offering tips to others that verge on coercive demands on improving their lives; and Zoe Bryce, former school teacher from the British midlands, also returning to England, future uncertain apart from an undefined program of “personal research” she intends to take up. None have been partnered at any time in their lives and none seem to know how to sustain a conversation.
While Pat is the more outgoing of the three, naming his many acquaintances—all quite respectable with honorable professions or trades—our narrator, Pattern, notes that “Pat could never keep the triumph from his voice when he talked of people who were ‘friends of his.’ He was like a big-game hunter, proud of the carcasses, but doomed to have no relationship with the living animal.” Toby and Zoe, too, seem doomed to remain alone, without romantic relationships, whatever their wishes to the contrary might be. Zoe, however, is kissed one night by a crewman who creeps into her cabin while she is not quite asleep. (Fairly chaste as far as sexual assaults go, but still. . .)
It is a momentous occasion for Zoe, who, until that moment in her late 30s had never been kissed before. The kiss itself—not its impropriety—haunts her the rest of her days (“After all, I am a woman who has been kissed!”), and her thoughts obsess for the remainder of the trip on giving birth to a child with a yellow crust across its eyes, born blind from syphilis. Zoe, Toby, and Pat are essentially members of Toby’s Lost Tribe. The inscrutability of their lives to others and themselves may not become apparent until much later, like the fate of a sheep Pattern describes that gets stuck in a bog and drowns:
Perhaps in five or ten years’ time, when with the whim and privilege peculiar to water, the underground creek has changed its course and the area is dry with couch or tussock, the bleached bones of the sheep will be found lying like broken script arranged in cunning disarray by the penstrokes of Time and the furtive corrections, blots, and underlinings of the weather. (Are our words thus, falling fleshed and heavily fleeced from our mouths, and only after a length of time can their true meaning, their gaunt uncluttered bones lie exposed upon the slopes of thought?)
For Janet Frame, the “five or ten years’ time” has become a century (this year marks the centennial of her birth). I hope Fitzcarraldo’s reprint of The Edge of the Alphabet initiates a revival of her vital voice.
Blurry
Dash Shaw
NYR Comics
Dash Shaw’s Blurry relates the interconnected lives of several characters, not all known to each other, who face difficult choices in their unsatisfying lives, from a college student trying to determine her major to a middle-aged professor trying to determine what to do with his career choice and marriage.
What is blurry about Blurry is the state of indecision the characters find themselves in, trying to determine major steps that will alter the course of their lives: whether to end a job, end a marriage, create a new identity—but what after that? Sensible reasons exist for sticking with the status quo, but sometimes gut instinct tells us otherwise. The gut isn’t always a reliable guide to decision-making, however. How do we know that we’re not deceiving ourselves, telling ourselves only what we want to hear? Are we feeling only transitory emotional responses to what in the long run will turn out to have been temporary impasses? The state of indecision is represented graphically by such things as blurry vision and dense fog on a road, while its counterpoint, hope, arises in the appearance of rainbows. (Not as hokey as it sounds, reduced schematically here.) Shaw tells his characters’ stories, their overlapping lives, moving forward and backward through time—where they are now, how they got there, what their next steps might be, illustrating how people come to develop faith in themselves, the faith required to take leaps into the unknown.
Unlike Shaw’s earlier works in which he makes color choices an integral part of decoding the stories—when and where they take place, which sequences belong to which characters’ lives—Blurry makes these associations with a monochrome palette and simple, understated lines and washes—just enough to convey the essence of a scene: the major action occurring and the reactions of those in the situation. It’s not “realism” in drawing but realism in emotional experiences, rich, vibrant, and visceral, rooted in the basics of self-identity and a sense of living with dignity.
Little Seed
Wei Tchou
Deep Vellum / A Strange Object
The feeling of grappling for guidance from someone else, of looking for the right way to be . . . what had it ever gotten me? A family that manipulated my sense of safety in order to ease their own pain? A boyfriend who required me to drink tea from a sock and thought walnuts were poison? Worse, I was starting to see how my fixation with a correct story had led me to hurt others, how my insistence on being led along by the right person turned the world and the people around me into objectives.
Little Seed by Wei Tchou, is a coming-of-age story about a young woman from a Chinese-American family, first-generation immigrants to the U.S. Her father is a doctor, well-regarded by his colleagues, but he and his wife are status-conscious and eager to blend in, be seen not just as equals but as high-achieving Americans of good breeding and taste, goals they demand of their children, too, the older brother Kang and his little sister Wei, the narrator of this memoir. Interleaved, as it were, with her family memoir are chapters given to her interest in ferns and discussions of their traits, variations and forms, and preferred environments.
The parents scream at each other and berate their children for their imperfections, less-than-ideal scholastic achievements, errors in judgment which fail expectations—behaviors revealing to the parents a lack of love, respect, and fidelity owed them by the children. Tchou’s family, her parents’ attitudes toward each other and their children, sound stereotypically Chinese (based on my years of living in Shanghai teaching students who live on the receiving end of such attitudes), making the reading of certain passages all the more painful for that. At age 16, Wei—known as Little Seed during the early part of her life—is sent by her parents to a live-in boarding school for the daughters of wealthy families, where she learns what it is to be an exclusionary WASP.
Tchou’s analogies between ferns and her family (she does try to connect the two) seem strained at times, and I think she senses the incongruities between them when she explicitly uses a fact about ferns as a condition that provokes questions about the degree of her Chineseness vs her Americanness, not just ferns as demonstrating characteristics about her family or her individuality. She struggles to determine what it means to be Chinese, Chinese-American, an individual, and which of these she wants to be or thinks she needs to be.
An ingrained sense of family, one’s place in the family and one’s duties toward that family are the elements that keep her family together. Otherwise, they are so emotionally distant from each other, so tenuously held together, that without the expectations imposed by notions of “family,” the whole unit would fall apart. Their commitments to each other are almost entirely conditional. When the conditions are violated, the screaming starts.
Early in college, Tchou falls in love with a man she calls Spider—a Chinese ex-pat, 20 years her senior, a self-styled vegetarian Buddhist and journalist but ultimately manipulative, passive-aggressive, and controlling, a man for whom charitable deeds are themselves acts of hostility, serving to highlight to others his estimation of their moral shortcomings. Tchou drops out of college for two years to live with him while serving as his amanuensis. She finally returns home, then back to college in New York, where she lands a job as an assistant at a prestigious magazine (which sounds like The New Yorker), eager, once again, to assimilate to a new setting, still forming herself, but as she imagines herself mirrored in the eyes of others.
To find herself, her independence and resiliency, Wei needs a period of disorientation but not isolation of environment, separation but not alienation from others, an immersion in the unknown and unfamiliar that yet supports and sustains her so that her fears are transitory, and the tendrils from the known world and the known self emerge from her emotional darkness, ready to be grasped in new understanding as needed. And in such a place, with such an experience, the puzzling pieces of her interest in ferns, the dysfunctional motivations of her family, and her sense of self finally come together.
Vacated Landscape
Jean Lahougue / K. E. Gormley
Wakefield Press
The unnamed narrator of Vacated Landscapes is a work-at-home book editor for a Parisian publisher. He’s been plying his trade for a couple of decades, and personally knows or is familiar with many of the industry’s famous and minor writers. His apartment is filled with unpublished submissions, manuscripts with promise but which, in their various ways, fall short of what they could otherwise be. They are works in eternal limbo, works whose development has been arrested.
One day, the narrator receives in the mail a slim manuscript. It has a mysterious and faltering quality to it, its contents never explicated to the reader, and its author known to us at first by his pseudonym, Desiderio, with references to a Renaissance painter named of the same name. A postmark reveals where the manuscript was mailed from—a small town, revealed to us only as V., a place of minor historical interest to tourists and art historians. The narrator is intrigued enough by the manuscript and its pseudonymous author to set himself up as a sleuth to track down the writer, whom he believes is a man named Jean Morelle. Although the contents are revealed to us only in allusions sprinkled throughout the rest of the novel, we sense that the manuscript has to do with the narrator. The narrator soon discovers that Morelle left V.—assuming he actually had ever been there—the day he mailed the manuscript. Nonetheless, the narrator decides to stay in V. to reconstruct what he can about Morelle, despite the ambiguity of what the narrator allows to pass for evidence.
The novel has something of the Oulipian about it, a sense that the author, Jean Lahougue, is working within constraints unarticulated to the reader, which trigger, within the reader, a sense of an underlying current, a current felt but difficult to pinpoint. Elements of this putative thread include, of its characters, places, and objects, qualities of opposites and oppositions, doppelgangers, serenity and threat. The narrator withholds from us key information, as do the people he meets from the narrator. But for what purpose? To what ends? This is Patrick Modiano on steroids.
Evasion, correction, emendation, amendment: The story is told as the draft of a novel but one that has already been written, perhaps twice already, with the third—what we’re reading—in progress. That is, the narrative forms a Möbius strip. Its oppositions are merely the other side of what we will come to again but with a modified sense of what those modifications suggest about the story, about its characters. Repetition with variation, as Morton Feldman might say in a different context. The novel’s consistency, its coherence, is the strip the narrative is founded on that we walk along. K. E. Gormley, the novel’s translator, admirably captures and sustains the ambiguities of Lahougue’s prose, its ongoing erasures and retractions, rather than toppled or tripped up by them.
We are told in Gormley’s afterward that Lahougue admires Agatha Christie, who once famously got in trouble for writing a whodunnit in which the narrator himself is the culprit, all the while casting doubt on the novel’s other characters’ innocence. The protagonist of Vacated is somewhere between narrator and narrated about. Although Wakefield Press does not usually publish works by living authors, usually limiting itself to works by French, Belgian, and German authors from the 1880s to 1930s, Vacated Landscape is of a piece with the rest of Wakefield’s catalog—moody and eccentric, informed by a sui generis sensibility.
Man Alone
Nick Petroulias
Masterthief Press
Man Alone consists of the ruminations of a husband and father left alone for the weekend by his wife and daughters, who are heading out to a beach cabin. For the first time in years, Phillip is by himself. Man Alone can be read as a counterpart to novels by women, aching for time alone, for a room of their own, women whose sense of self has become lost among the identities of and duties owed to their children, jobs, and spouses. The “selflessness” of a caretaker is sometimes best understood literally.
There’s a fear when facing a lull. Without the routine of the girls in the house, I move around the house like a fly caught in a repeating square flight path. I’m no longer energised by their absence.
Phillip takes on the caretaker role in his household, voluntarily so, in his case, being the partner with the job offering the more flexible schedule with the fewer demanding ours, doing the laundry, cooking, grocery shopping, and shepherding of his daughters Elena and Fiona to school and their events, and doing what he can to make the life of his wife, Beatrice, easier. His vision of the future, while house-husbanding, extends no further than the outfits Elena and Fiona will need for school tomorrow morning or predicting when the freezer will need to be refilled. He enjoys the responsibilities and thinks of almost nothing else.
While the narrator looks forward to maximizing his time alone, his promised 48 hours solo—maybe 72 if his wife decides to spend an extra day—it takes 20% of the novel’s length to get the girls out the door, and most of his thoughts are about them rather than his plans. He also spends a great deal of his time (up to the book’s halfway mark, at least) jarring food for future family meals. So much for alone time!
Phillip exhibits introspective qualities akin to those found in Nicholson Baker’s early books, such as Room Temperature and Mezzanine, when mulling over daily minutiae. But although Phillip’s daughters are still in elementary school, often the narrative tone is of a man older than presented here—say early middle age, mid-30s to early 40s—more akin to the contemplative musing of characters novels by Sam Savage (The Way of the Dog, Glass, It Will End with Us), where the reflections are products of six decades or so of experiences and the thoughts serve more as a summing up than a way forward: Phillip often talks of “last times”: “Is this the last time I saw my childhood friend? Is this the last time I experienced X, smelt Y,” etc.
Phillip’s thoughts about Johnson, a near-anonymously named kid from elementary school Phillip has obsessed about over the years for reasons he can’t determine—the mystery itself concerns him as much as the cipher Johnson. Phillip cannot recall of what their friendship consisted, when or why the kid’s family moved. He has dim recollections of what Johnson wore, and his memory suggests that Johnson lived in a different neighborhood, which would have required parental permission from Phillip’s mother to visit, which Phillip is almost certain he did. His mother remembers nothing of Johnson, nor does Phillip’s old friend Daniel, whom Phillip hasn’t seen in years and with whom he’s promised to meet up with during his sacred solo time.
Seeing Daniel isn’t the joyous meet-up Phillip had hoped it might be. Have their mutual interests thinned over the years, replaced by divergent paths, duties, and goals? Is the friendship tenuous? Has each of them evolved and changed so much that only memories hold them together any longer?
Author Nick Petroulias, through his character Phillip, seems to suggest that our sense of self is based to a great degree on who we owe allegiances to, the conditions in which our loves and likes of others flourish, and the ways in which our desires to express our affections by the giving of ourselves. Perhaps our sense of self is strongest when we think of ourselves least.
Mourning a Breast
Xi Xi / Jennifer Feeley
NYRB Classics
In 1989, the Hong Kong writer Xi Xi felt a lump on one of her breasts during a routine self-examine in the shower. This begins her story of confronting breast cancer, its treatment, engaging with Hong Kong’s health care system, comparing notes in waiting rooms with others undergoing cancer treatment, and detailing the effects of the treatments and surgery on her life, responsibilities, and friendships.
Written with calm dispassion and understatement, Mourning a Breast feels more like a conversation with an intimate friend than a series of confessions or the venting of woes and anger. Xi Xi even treats the narrative as a cross between “how to” and “what to expect” books by ending some chapters with such italicized phrases like “For more information on X, go to page 89,” or “If you want to ignore the boring parts about nutrition, skip to such-and-such a page.” (And, no, she hasn’t written a Cortazar-like Hopscotch for cancer survivors.) In countries like China, where matters regarding health are either avoided in conversations or conducted with degrees of shame and embarrassment, Xi Xi’s plain-spoken narrative offers a panic-free cross between memoir and guidelines for self-treatment. Although developments in breast cancer treatment and prevention have changed somewhat in the 30-odd years since Xi Xi published this book, Mourning a Breast serves as a compassionate record of how one woman, with the support of her friends, dealt with her diagnosis, free of devastation and despair.
Great Fear on the Mountain
Charles Ferdinand Ramuz / Bill Johnston
Archipelago Books
A small town, high in the Swiss Alps and low in the coffers, needs to bring in more income to sustain itself. A town meeting is held to discuss re-using pastureland that has lain dormant for the past twenty years. The location is distant (a four-hours’ walk in good weather), dangerous (there are paths that can be walked only one person at a time), and isolated. The vote is 2-to-1 in favor of re-using the pastureland; the nays coming largely from older residents who recall—with contradictory testimony—of an awful event twenty years ago that occurred there (but which is left blank in the narration) and see it as a threat to human life not worth the promise of any amount of money. Those who vote aye are mainly citizens too young to recall the rumors. Because of its location—in mountain shadow most of the time—it is good only for two or three months a year. Seven people, all in need of extra money, enlist for the herding jobs, with a promise of a pay of 20 francs at season’s end.
The herding animals start getting sick, an illness referred to only as “the sickness,” a highly contagious disease that requires separating the unwell herd from the well and the immediate execution of the unwell herd upon getting sick, followed by a burial seven feet underground. A veterinarian who treks out to visit the encampment at first word of the breakout wears a change of clothing, shoes, and a veiled hat resembling a beekeeper’s hat, all of which must be burned after he pronounces the diagnosis. The men encamping are not to return until season’s end—only two months—and their supplies dropped off at a neutral location so that the townspeople do not carry it back with them. (The disease can even be carried on footwear.)
A mule goes missing; a rifle misfires, damaging the hand of the hunter who used it, the hand turning into a festering wound; the body of the fiancée of one of the herders turns up in a river after she tries to sneak away to the camp. The number of herders is down to five; one of whom taunts the others by sleeping outside the chalet that is their only protection from the night, the door roped tightly shut. Fear pervades the townspeople, as well. The weather is beautiful and clear.
Who narrates this tale? Someone who testifies as a witness to the events, told to a “you”—not the reader of the book but another “you” who, like the narrator also witnessed what happened but perhaps was responsible for the evil events. But are the events the results of a malevolent force, the Him that is also often referred to? The events have natural explanations. The chronologically tight cluster of multiple ill fortune makes the natural seem unlikely, however, and thus unnatural. Ramuz’s descriptions of nature, via Bill Johnston’s crisp translation, aren’t as foreboding as Adalbert Stifter’s, who also was a student of the unforgiving Alpine ecology, an ecology that is brutal but not necessarily malevolent. That which is foreboding seems instead to be a product of how the locals interpret what they see—the changing colors of the glaciers from morning till dusk, the precipitous hang from on high of ice and rock, what is hidden and revealed by light, shadow, altitude, and depth. The “Him” and “you,” however, aren’t what they might otherwise appear to be. Great Fear is an environmental novel about the type of community usually romanticized as “in harmony with nature.”
New Inventions and the Latest Innovations
Gaston de Pawlowski / Amanda Demarco
Wakefield Press
Better than a catalog from Hammacher Schlemmer or Carol Wright are the goofy gadgets described throughout the pages of Gaston de Pawlowski’s New Inventions and the Latest Innovations. Originally published in 1916 as a series of humorous squibs for a French magazine, New Inventions skewers scientific pretentions of progress and honors uselessness and inutility of faux devices for everything from home furnishings to armaments, from dentures to fashion. Here are a few of the devices described:
The Ichthyocinema is a
cinema . . . placed on a fishing boat, and at night it projects images into the deep waters capable of delighting even the most unimaginative of fish. Fifteen hundred meters of film spool past the joy-widened eyes of the aquatic race, including views of old pieces of Gruyère full of worms, decomposing cuts of meat, and an entire teeming world of insects. The fish, delighted, come from all over, and when the fishermen haul in the nets, it resembles a second miraculous catch of fish.
Then there’s the “Ovidatum Poultry Marker…an extremely interesting device placed behind laying hens, which allows their eggs to be imprinted by means of an ink roller at the moment of their production.”
The fresh eggs thus come with a verified date stamp and a series number. With the Ovidatum Poultry Marker farmers can also tell the exact number of eggs laid by each hen. They can thus detect any foul play.
The device, sold with a little pair of suspenders, is compact, durable, and affordable. It’s of interest to poultry farmers everywhere.
Given the current rise in pedestrian fatalities over the past ten years, there may even be renewed interest in Pawlowski’s proposed ink stamper mechanism on tires that would indicate the date of running over a pedestrian, and to which he suggests
it would be nice to add some polite turn of phrase to the stamp, like those found on calling cards: “With my sincerest apologies,” “My regrets,” or “With condolences.” That would give some small satisfaction to the victim, and it’s a mark of tact and good upbringing on the part of the motorist.
Recommended for any fan of bizarre and useless technological advances.
Sunday
Olivier Schrauwen
Fantagraphics
Olivier Schrauwen has a knack for inventing insufferable characters with a charm best appreciated at a distance, say in a book one can close periodically and shelve for a few hours or days before taking a deep breath and returning to. In real life, you might need months or a couple of years to steel yourself for the onslaught of aggressive self-aggrandizement that masks a shy person’s tendency to get in his own way while blaming others for his errors and acts of procrastination. Perhaps “inventing” is a poor choice of verb, since his “characters” are often based on family members, living and dead.
In his newest book, a Ulysses of soused solipsism, Schrauwen’s cousin Thibault is the focus. Sunday’s 474 pages report the thoughts and the actions of Thibault throughout the course of a single day, a day ordinary in its prosaic non-events (checking his email, getting a song stuck in his head, procrastinating on a job assignment) and extraordinary in what Schrauwen reveals as the profound contradictions that make for friendship and love, even when a person feels most isolated from social conventions. Thibault is garrulous only when drunk, which—along with smoking dope—is his relief-valve for both his self-inflicted frustrations and those the accompany day-to-day living. But it’s putzing around that often makes the book so funny: In his underwear and robe, groggily making breakfast, while James Brown’s “Get Up I Feel Like Being a Sex Machine” plays in his head (which it does for most of the day, popping in and out without prompting). He worries about his girlfriend, who should be returning that evening from a long trip abroad but who isn’t returning his messages. But while he worries over her procrastination, he steams over being called to task by a magazine for delaying an important but easy decision (he designs fonts). He is intent on avoiding a cousin who’s an obnoxious drunk but fails to consider his own behaviors when soused.
Technically, what I find most interesting about Sunday, that I don’t recall seeing in other graphic novels or comics, is his avoidance of deep focus, which he replaces with various levels of blurriness—a cinematic approach to storytelling invoking memory, uncertainty, degrees of importance, and changes in narrative direction. This technique—along with color choices to indicate time, place, incident, and level of details included in each panel—lends the book a visual energy matching Thibault’s emotional energy—both of which become increasingly and formally unhinged the further Thibault descends into anxiety—making for a compelling narrative with a surprising and redemptive ending.
Distant Ruptures
CF
NYR Comics
CF (aka Christopher Forgues) creates comics and illustrations that act more as comments on the comics medium than as acts of sustained storytelling. Blending tropes from science fiction and action stories with such ephemeral media as notebook paper, including scratched out images and words, smudges, poor reproductions, and indications of hesitations and thought reversals, CF joins transcendent iconography to pop culture disposability.
Many of the works gathered in Distant Ruptures were given away or left behind at social gathering spots, intended as fortuitous findings for whoever happened upon them, semi-anonymous gifts of chance. Other images and short comic strips gathered were photocopied cheaply and sold in limited editions. The sureness of CF’s lines and visual cohesion of his stories, bizarre as they are, belie the offhandedness, indifference, and talent-insecurity their production methods might otherwise suggest.
Even for readers familiar with comic bookstores with a deep interest in artists who push the boundaries of non-mainstream narrative and illustration (which are rare enough), finding a place that stocks his work is difficult. (His best-known works, which do have a sustained story, Powr Mastrs, Volumes 1-3, are long out of print, and a promised fourth volume sometimes shows up as forthcoming, only to disappear again.) Thankfully, the editor and cartoonist Sammy Harkham, in conjunction with NYR Comics have rectified this problem with an anthology of CF’s earlier works that will finally bring his considerable talents to a wider audience.
The Murmuration
Carlos Labbé / Will Vanderhyden
Open Letter
In The Murmuration, a retired sportscaster is coerced out of retirement by a female sports council member to call a soccer game between Chile and Brazil during the 1962 World Cup. Ostensibly brought on for what members of a shadowy political group feel is his ability to arouse powerful nationalist emotions for a game Chile will probably lose, the narration—from the sportscaster’s point of view—intercuts between descriptions of the fast action on the playing field and the languid, patient, and discreet motions of a shadowy group of council members, one member of whom seems to have been contracted to kill at least one of the other members, but in such a way that the killer’s presence will be easily forgotten and erased. I suppose the “murmuration” of the book’s title comes from the rapidly changing positions of the players and the distractions created by the noise of the crowd. (The narrative creates an illusion of a loud playing field juxtaposed against a silent meeting of council members in one of the arena’s executive suites.) It is easy to imagine the novel as a film, with quick cuts between the running, kicking, and blocking on the sun-lit field and the slow drags on cigarettes followed by long pulls on bourbon in the smokey suite.
Technically, this book does interesting things, but it still left me feeling impatient waiting for the assassination, telegraphed early in the book, with only its unknown consequences to look forward to. Although I usually look for or respond well to formal innovations, that I felt unsatisfied by the novel results from shortcomings entirely my own: I never played soccer or watch it on TV. Had I or did I, my engagement might have been keener, much as I suspect it would have been if the game were baseball, football, or hockey—sports I have played and do watch. Second, and more significantly, although I have passing familiarity with some of South America’s more egregious tyrants and terrorists—Chile’s Pinochet, Argentina’s Videla, and Peru’s Guzmán, for instance—I am unfamiliar with the tensions and hostilities among the nations within that continent. Third, although Latin American patriarchal culture tends to be hostile toward and dismissive of women, violent retribution on the part of female leaders is also unfamiliar to me. An introduction or afterward situating the novel’s actions in historical context may have given me the “in” I needed to guide my understanding of what I was seeing.