I was not looking forward to reading this book. The roots of fascism and Nazism in twentieth century Germany? I feel like I know something about this,I was not looking forward to reading this book. The roots of fascism and Nazism in twentieth century Germany? I feel like I know something about this, and have read my share of Holocaust literature, but I just had read Lutes's first book, Jar of Fools, and this was said to be his masterpiece, this trilogy, and it kind of looks like it is! I liked his first book and most of what I have read from him, but this is a step up to greatness, and it is only the first of the trilogy! The idea of the novel, named as it is, is to ask certain questions: What would it have been like to be in Berlin, a city only culturally second to Paris, in the twenties? Amazing theater, art, and an explosion of writing. What would it have been like to have such a magical mecca turn so quickly to evil? To suddenly have a view of art dominate the scene that would denounce all other forms of art?! To have at one's fingertips literally thousands of new pages every day of books, criticism, theory, magazines, journals, and newspapers, but if Berlin might be seen as a flowing river, such words were like stones that sank to the bottom of that river, worthless, unheard (and increasingly censored, of course).
We see all this cultural moment through the lens of historical fiction, a graphic novel, and specifically, through the experiences of two people who meet on a train on their way in to Berlin: Kurt Severing, a (politically left) journalist, and Marthe Muller, an (apolitical) artist. In volume one, comprising the first 8 chapters/issues, published in 2000, we focus on 1928-29, and indeed, the whole 22 chapter issue series focuses on 1928-1933. We move from month to month, mapping the landscape, as we get a close up fictional look (and see, and hear, in ways history books cannot help us do) of what it might have been like for a range of humane people to be living during this time in this great city. That good things happen by good people in the midst of emerging fascism (and so so much worse, of course) also gets acknowledged here.
Berlin: City of Stones begins with Marthe Müller, an art student, arriving in Berlin. She meets and develops a relationship with journalist Kurt Severing. A second storyline describes a working-class family which breaks up due to differing political views, including the mother, Gudrun, who joins the communists with her daughters Elga and Silvia, while the father takes his son Heinz to the Nazis. The book ends at the massacre of 1 May 1929, the International Workers Day (known in German as Blutmai).
To my mind, this great novel can be put on the shelf proudly next to Maus and other great graphic novels, ones with historic scope and the intimacy of individual actors experiencing the shock and despair of their country turning to fascism, to Hitler. I reviewed the second volume as well, and like many people, I await the third volume. So far, as of today, July 20, 2017, the 20th issue has come out. A (maybe) eighteen year journey! But a life work, clearly, and worth the wait....more
I saw that others were reading this review, so I pulled out this book at dawn and reread it and edited/ added some things in my review. Like this poemI saw that others were reading this review, so I pulled out this book at dawn and reread it and edited/ added some things in my review. Like this poem:
Possessed (for my parents)
I have never left. Your bodies are before me at all times, in the dark I see the stars of your teeth in their fixed patterns wheeling over my bed, and the darkness is your hair, the fragrance of your two heads over my crib, your body-hairs which I count as God counts the feathers of the sparrows, one by one. And I never leave your sight, I can look in the eyes of any stranger and find you there, in the rich swimming bottom-of-the-barrel brown, or in the blue that reflects from the knife’s blade, and I smell you always, the dead cigars and Chanel in the mink, and I can hear you coming, the slow stopped bear tread and the quick fox, her nails on the ice, and I dream the inner parts of your bodies, the coils of your bowels like smoke, your hearts opening like jaws, drops from your glands clinging to my walls like pearls in the night. You think I left—I was the child who got away, thousands of miles, but not a day goes past that I am not turning someone into you. Never having had you, I cannot let you go, I turn now, in the fear of this moment, into your soft stained paw resting on her breast, into your breast trying to creep away from under his palm— your gooseflesh like the shells of a thousand tiny snails, your palm like a streambed gone dry in summer.
This is a great volume of poetry. Why is it I, having begun to read her thirty years ago and more, never read this book, the most and most highly reviewed one on Goodreads? Not sure. I may have picked it up and saw poems about her kids and I had no kids, maybe thought the edge would come off her Satan Says voice and become sentimental because of that, and of course I would have reason to believe it would, because we do, I do, other poets do, but she does not. The same threatening, sinister, unpredictable, sometimes hostile world remains, but now threatens her children as it did her. Once again we see the body is so central in Olds: Vibrant, buoyant, youthful bodies and aging, decaying and dying, decomposing bodies; the sexual body certainly, full of a sex that beckons, threatens, this powerful force that is always there.
How are these poems alike and different than her last book, about her divorce, Stag's Leap? The unstintingly look at the self, and family, in the older Olds, in Stag's Leap, is there from the beginning, the rage, the passion, the autobiographical narrative drive, the "confessional" sharing of painful details from her life, but in this book, maybe her best from a "literary" perspective, she is more lyrical, more open to dramatic metaphor. Language, powerful language, is more central here than in the later work.
In Stag's Leap the language is a bit more stripped down, more narrative, less patient with the poetic/literary separation between experience and life. The language in The Dead and the Living is often gorgeous, and one can see how three great poets like June Jordan, Charles Simic, and David Wagoner (amazing committee!) might have chosen it for the 1983 Lamont Prize in Poetry (for second books). My favorites are NOT the ones about children, though, in spite of my now having my own brood; they are, as always, the poems about her sisters and brothers and grandparents and especially the deliciously vicious ones of her mother and father, the poems of not blind but completely eyes-open rage at the emotional and physical and sexual abuse of her childhood, where I voyeuristically peer around the corners of pages into the very car wrecks of her past.
I like the few poems here about photographs, the (always!) unsentimental portraits and elegies for the dead that are not her own, but the edge is off when talking about Marilyn Monroe, they have not hurt her (though somehow even that poem is about Olds and kinds of objectification and abuse in an amazing way) as her family has done to her. I make it seem like here is no joy in these poems but there is on almost every page, and there's wit and humor, too, and passionate love and passionate sex and passionate language, exulting in that. I think I am going to reread everything I have read from her and write, write, write, my own life. We all should!...more
Tell Me Something is a short book, with a silent film-era feel, an almost silent comic, featuring a guy who finds a photograph of an old love. This reTell Me Something is a short book, with a silent film-era feel, an almost silent comic, featuring a guy who finds a photograph of an old love. This reminds him of those days, and he wonders if this love can be rekindled. He finds her and finds she is unhappy. Can they be happy again as they once were?
So we get a short black and white story of the kindling (in flashbacks) and rekindling, deftly done, a romance of love lost and found. With simple, clean lines and few words, can Jason tug at your heart? Decide for yourself, but I say this is a comics master at work, teaching you in the way of Schulz and Hergé and Chaplin and Keaton about how much you can say and do with very little, with just enough.
A reread, in 2018, after 6 years.
A reread, in 2021. You have to reread the classics! This isn't his very best work, but it is still a storytelling clinic....more
I am not sure why others are not liking this book more. I think it is amazing, with terrific drawing and storytelling and depth. Have been reading SweI am not sure why others are not liking this book more. I think it is amazing, with terrific drawing and storytelling and depth. Have been reading Sweet Tooth, another father-son story from Lemire that is in a more dystopian setting. I really liked The Nobody. I liked Essex County, too, maybe his best work that I have read from him. But this is also great, pretty consistent tone with Essex, an indication of his potential extending even more, maybe.
Why do I like this so much? Is it because I am a father of sons? It is haunting, but not exactly Twilight Zone scary, in my opinion (contrary to the intro). It is more about a father, abandoned by his own father, coming to terms with his long unresolved father issues as he prepares to be a father himself. That makes sense to me, and works in sync with my own experience. You sometimes get dragged into lots of issues as you prepare to parent, duh!
Jack, the main character and an underwater welder, likes to dive deep and make connections, weld them together, make sense of them, but this particular episode of his life is traumatic for him, needs to be faced for him to go on. Always for Lemire it is the human, it is empathy, we care deeply about the characters, Jack, his wife, his Dad, his wife, and all their deep sadnesses, all good people, all a little lost, and trying to get found and to find each other. No one seems to completely give up. Beautiful book. The "dream" or fantasy sequences are particularly compelling, deftly done....more
Really beautifully, lovingly done story based on historical materials. Wrenchingly harsh, but hopeful in that the rug weaver's anguish and his love foReally beautifully, lovingly done story based on historical materials. Wrenchingly harsh, but hopeful in that the rug weaver's anguish and his love for his family and his artistic vision and commitment come through... Not a sentimental, sappy, happy ending, a good and clear picture of a simple man suffering to make a living in harsh times. Gorgeously done, with muted tans and browns and greys, all in honor of the weaver's own artistic vision......more
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce walk into a Parisian bar. . . and yes, this IS the bA reread, with review, finally:
F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, Ezra Pound, and James Joyce walk into a Parisian bar. . . and yes, this IS the beginning of a (literary) joke, and an hilarious one, depicting these artists 1) as anthropomorphic animals and 2) as graphic novelists. Lots of inside jokes abound, for the literati. Guest appearances from Zelda, Gertrude Stein, to take us back to the left bank in the twenties, ooh la la! But the gang reference is to a bank heist the boys want to pull off to support their art. The focus, as is Woody Allen’s Paris film, on Hem.
Hemingway, describing his life as a comic artist: “It's the only thing I know how to do. I can't drive a bus or hit a nail with a hammer. I can tell a story in tiny pictures and fuck up my eyesight a little more every day.”
The artists discuss and share and critique their current work, and comment on other artists: Dostoevsky (“I can’t tell any of his characters apart!”) to Faulkner (“Hasn’t he heard of white space? His panels are too crowded!”)
Jason is perhaps most lauded for his melancholy work, such as “Why Are You Doing This?” and “Hey Wait,” where he convinces that cartoon animals can make you feel deeply. Here he reveals his love of these artists as well as his silly side (which is also clear from the four collected works in Almost Silent). If you like Paris in the twenties and any of the above writers, read this, by all means. It’s hilarious and impressive satirical work, dry humor at its best.
You can see sample pages here at the Fantagraphics website:
The darker, harsher Jason. I’m thinking of Daniel Clowes, post-Ghost World movie success, who clearly is poised for The Big Bucks, and he instead headThe darker, harsher Jason. I’m thinking of Daniel Clowes, post-Ghost World movie success, who clearly is poised for The Big Bucks, and he instead heads in a darker direction, as if to say, I’m not selling out, I’m not going on talk shows, stop being so adoring of me, I do alt comix, I'm an outsider, so deal with it. Almost all but the title story in this comic collection has something to offend in it, and many people like it much less than his earlier works, but I will hold with my earlier assessment and stay with my original five stars. But be warned: This is less sweet, less sad, less whimsical, but I say the formal experiments in the stories are impressive, challenging. He’s not so much about the cute here.
A perfect example of this shift in tone is “A Cat From Heaven” which appears like it could be sorta autobiographical, because it features comics artist Jason in an epic fight with his girlfriend, saying things to her you never want to hear from your comics hero. He drinks to much, is late for a comic reading, sleeps with a fan, gets beaten up, begs forgiveness of his girlfriend. In a final image, he draws himself drawing. Autobiographical comics, or a commentary on autobiographical comics (because it never really happened, I hope?), or both. Interesting, and not cute at all.
“The Brain that Wouldn't Virginia Woolf,” is a weird tale of a girlfriend whose head is on a plate attached to tubes. It has this Frankenstein feel to it as he is trying to fix her problem, which is that she needs a body, so he goes out to look at ideal bodies for her to have. So it’s a strange horror story about this guy trying to get a body for his body-less girlfriend. Yeah, he's a lech, of course, too. Oh, yeah, and he caused her condition in an accident. It’s a sort of dark mash-up of The Brain that Wouldn’t Die and Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, which is kinda brilliant in its own goofy way. Pretty cute.
“Tom Waits on the Moon” is the best title, but it’s not “over the moon,” as in romance, really, again. It’s a series of portraits/vignettes of unhappy, Tom-Waits-song people, stuck, with missed opportunities, lonely. And has a strange finish that might explain it all. Not sure. Sad, melancholy, not so cute.
“So Long, Mary-Ann” (the title is a reference to a Leonard Cohen song; you gotta love these Jason pop references) is a crime three-way romance mash-up that Jason does so well. With murders and (sort of) steamy infidelity and double-crosses that make it clear this is basically a dark noir story where you can’t trust anyone, where no on is likeable. Not cute, but accomplished.
There's one section that is just a series of "covers" of Van Morrison song titles with monsters. The funny, goofy Jason returns! Carefully, Jason, we might just fall in love with you, again! SO cute!!
“Athos in America” is the least dark story and this least interesting to me, a kind of prequel of sorts to Jason’s other musketeer story The Last Musketeer. It’s a kind of golden age send-up of a guy who dated Louise Brooks (who was a silent film star, kiddies!). All right, pretty cute, I guess
But on the whole interesting and impressive. Low overall on the cuteness scale, but higher on the artist scale?...more
Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine looks like my husband, casting himself off a cliff in his fervor to get free of me. Stag’s Leap
Then the drawing on the label of our favorite red wine looks like my husband, casting himself off a cliff in his fervor to get free of me. His fur is rough and cozy, his face placid, tranced, ruminant, the bough of each furculum reaches back to his haunches, each tine of it grows straight up and branches, like a model of his brain, archaic, unwieldy. He bears its bony tray level as he soars from the precipice edge, dreamy. When anyone escapes, my heart leaps up. Even when it’s I who am escaped from, I am half on the side of the leaver. It's so quiet, and empty, when he's left. I feel like a landscape, a ground without a figure. Sauve qui peut—let those who can save themselves save themselves. Once I saw a drypoint of someone tiny being crucified on a fallow deer’s antlers. I feel like his victim, and he seems my victim, I worry that the outstretched legs on the hart are bent the wrong way as he throws himself off. Oh my mate. I was vain of his faithfulness, as if it was a compliment, rather than a state of partial sleep. And when I wrote about him, did he feel he had to walk around carrying my books on his head like a stack of posture volumes, or the rack of horns hung where a hunter washes the venison down with the sauvignon? Oh leap, leap! Careful of the rocks! Does the old vow have to wish him happiness in his new life, even sexual joy? I fear so, at first, when I still can’t tell us apart. Below his shaggy belly, in the distance, lie the even dots of a vineyard, its vines not blasted, its roots clean, its bottles growing at the ends of their blowpipes as dark, green, wavering groans. —Sharon Olds
I read Satan Says, her 1980 first book, as I read this latest, 2012, effort, and the first is maybe a little edgier, a little scarier and more disturbing and thus, for me, a little more exciting, but this one is very powerful. If we have read the "confessional" poetry of Olds oever the years, we have gotten to know this ex, this husband, the object of much fierce love. But there remains in this book that familiar passion, a mixture of rage and tenderness, with sharp language, and always blunt and always surprising.
I recall reading her memoirish account of her nursing her (incestuous, and that's key) father to his death. Intensely anguished and complicated, this love that seemed to have survived in some fashion to the very end. Olds's work: This is not poetry to lull you to sleep, lyrical poetry, but poetry to wake you up for your own life and tragedy and passions. She provides a model and inspiration for you to document your life as she has done. Memoir poetry. Narrative. Not language poetry, though there is some rich and exciting language within the narratives, and now, at the end of a 32-year marriage, she takes out her language scalpel and dissects the process of relationship grief.
And why read this? To see with what grace we can learn how to live our own suffering, how to celebrate what we can along the way, as she does, trying to be fair to the riches of the past and present amongst the wreckage. Anyway, through this revisiting Olds I loved getting to know her again, like an old friend. She's talking to us, so invites this fantasy of being intimate with us. There are stunning poems in this new book, as strong as ever.
Maybe there is more tenderness, less rage, and maybe you miss that young screaming, that shocking shout and cry, that blunt fuck you, but there are forgiveness and joy in surprising places, and that's what I need to learn, always. She teaches us how to live in some traditions of great literature, the tradition of humane letters and the tradition of writing as healing, how to draw from that, the elegy, the personal. She has no secrets and thus she tells you one way how to write, to turn yourself inside out. Loved it, loved it....more
Amazing book. Thrilling. One of the very best writers on the planet, without question. In a league with and of the type: Sherman Alexie, Luis Urrea, DAmazing book. Thrilling. One of the very best writers on the planet, without question. In a league with and of the type: Sherman Alexie, Luis Urrea, Dave Eggers. Yunior, who also narrated The Short Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, narrates most of these short stories, and he is one wild and crazy character. In this short story collection--nominated for the National Book Award one year after Oscar Wao won the Pulitzer, in the SAME WEEK as he was awarded a MacArthur!!!--you hear Yunior (this continuously unfaithful yet always somehow attractive and likeable and charming and laughably misguided character) telling stories or being told about in much of the book.
This book is like a "what not to do get a girl" in tragi-comic mode. It's about women-obsessed Dominican men--but also just men--and how they, time and time again, lose women, throw them away, disrespect them, leave them, lie to them, and so on. In spite of this, I know many women who love this guy as a writer.. . Oscar Wao was THE favorite book in my fiction class last spring, with mostly women in the class.
In these books Diaz is creating, on the one hand, a kind of forum on male sexuality, and on the other hand showing you how to write an amazing story, technically, creating memorable characters and language that is just (to me, anyway) thrilling. Must read. Gorgeous prose, profane, hip, real, as he works on his craft of trying things from various points of view, including playing around with second person in places. I hungrily await something new, because I have at this point read everything he has written, but this guy is a notoriously slow writer, so I am patient, because I know when I read it he will get it right....more
6/1/12: I just finished this brilliant, brilliant "book" (that comes in a game box, larger than a Monopoly box), with various sizes and colors and sha6/1/12: I just finished this brilliant, brilliant "book" (that comes in a game box, larger than a Monopoly box), with various sizes and colors and shapes of books and magazines and flyers and a children's book and a game board. Why a game box, with a game board? To resuscitate, in part, the idea of reading as game, even if not exclusively for "fun" (though it is also about that). I think the publication of Building Stories is one of the most important events in the history of graphic literature, an instant classic, but it is not all play, and it is not primarily a book for kids. Ware is writing about important and also relatively mundane events in the lives of ordinary people; he's writing about eating and sleeping and work and talk and relationship struggles and parenting, the stuff of any novel, and it's also about adult loneliness.
The protagonist of Building Stories is an (unnamed) woman who lost part of her leg in a childhood boating accident. She lives on the third floor of a three-story Chicago brownstone apartment building, with a couple who constantly argue on the second floor and an older landlady on the first. The woman sees herself as a failed artist, and part of the work follows her in her twenties. Later in life, as a mother, she puts on weight and feels her creativity stifled by what is now a suburban life in Oak Park. She thinks a lot about her first boyfriend, who left her after an abortion, and feels a little frustrated with her husband. So this is a book about women (two others, as well) primarily, who live largely alone and mostly unhappy, and much of that unhappiness seems to be because of men, but it is also about capturing their interior life, each of them.
When this book came out I went to a talk Ware gave at Frank Lloyd Wright's Unity Temple, here in our village of Oak Park, IL, the nearest west suburb of Chicago (and yes, Ware lives 3-4 blocks from me in Oak Park, I'm a neighbor-name-dropper, sorry, okay, I'm human), and he said part of the impetus for the book came from something his wonderful storyteller Grandma suggested he do: To tell the stories of everyday people just doing what they do every day, washing dishes, folding clothes, nothing spectacular. And that is (in part) just what he does, no Hollywood, no flash in the narratives, and yet elevating these lives to importance in these, carefully and lovingly rendered--and in its own way spectacular, exquisite--ways. That's where the "flash" is here, in the amazing art (he's one of the 4-5 best and most influential comics artists ever, without question), clearly. And in revealing the complexities of relationships that emerge over time, primarily ones between men and women.
Ware is famously meticulous; he spends typically 100 hours on each page from start to finish, and this book represents ten years of work, so don't expect a sequel any time soon. As with Jimmy Corrigan, this is a story of interlocking sad stories, building on each other, but they are not ALL sad. Another impetus for this work is the birth of Ware's child, he says, which he sees as this amazing gift to his own own previously lonely life. Ware, famously good at preserving a sense of sadness in so much of his work, includes small moments here that redeem, rescue us, as often happens in parenting. We live in a time when many people seem to be interested in the lives of the sexy and rich and famous, a time when many of us seem to have agreed to the bashing and blaming of the poor for their own poverty, where writing a song like "Eleanor Rigby" suddenly seems out of place, where America's "This is For All the Lonely People" may seem sort of quaint. But these stories of the lonely are important, we need them. The everyday lives of individuals can get lost in today's cynical media culture and in political decision-making. Empathy can get lost in isolation.
So, Building Stories: A fairly simple and mundane title, and concept, that the people who live in a building live lives that can be framed as stories, and these stories "build" on each other and through each other, in some ways, as people interact with each other. And then, maybe especially in an old building we can imagine it happening this way, the building itself becomes a character, sort of omnisciently commenting on the lives lived within its walls. That concept of a building's stories isn't spectacular, maybe (if the walls could talk, we say), but it is powerful in its simplicity and honors his Grandma's wish for the simple and straightforward, though the reading of the texts is anything but simple if you like chronology, and the shared experience of a book group all reading the same thing at the same time. You can't do that with this book, folks. Can't. Obviously. Every piece you take out of the box will determine a different order of the narrative.
How fun to talk about this book in a book group or class, in how differently people read the book. Because each person who picks this "book" up will read it in a radically different way, beginning to end. And while Ware seems sort of aesthetically "controlling" in the meticulousness and precision of his art (feels like Mondrian's mathematical rectangles as much as adult-level Charles Schulz), he does NOT want to control the way you read the story he has written; he makes it impossible for him to control the way you see the story, it is your choice in how you proceed.
And some of the mundane, everyday objects he honors are the things he and so many of us readers love, the differently shaped books of childhood, comic books, pamphlets, journals, magazines, some hard cover, perfect-bound and stitched, some paper, maps, board games. This production could have been done digitally, I suppose, as in just dropping the pieces at a site and letting you play, and probably this will happen, but the old-fashioned part of Ware (as with Seth's work) loves/mourns the passing of the visceral feel and smell of books in paper, in all shapes and sizes. In that Monopoly game box that holds so much for us. In all of Ware there is a deep nostalgia for the passing of time and the loss of things in that passing.
So you read this in the way you want to, randomly picking up pieces and poring over the meticulous artwork and taking one of three primary routes, as they focus on each of three women from three different floors of an old, cool Chicago building (though one moves out to Oak Park, as Ware himself did, from Chicago, so you get spectacular renditions of all the cool architecture here, the Frank Lloyd Wright home and the Unity Temple and some of his other designed homes in this village, one of the most architecturally significant sites in this country). I went to an exhibition of Ware's work on the architecture of Chicago at the Chicago Art Institute a couple years ago, and he is loved and studied by architects everywhere for his precise attention to building details.
What precedent is there for a book as a box of pieces of work? Sorrentino (who wrote a novel he said could be read any way you wanted), Pessoa (who put slips of paper over the years in a box and said it was a novel), digital storytelling with link after link of ways to read; so he isn't inventing this approach, all these ways of writing that lead to open ways of reading exist, but Ware is doing it as well as one can imagine in a product you can hold in your hands, hour after hour. Having a book like this fits with contemporary theories of multiplicity and ways of reading that approach it as subjective, personal, interpretation as open, always.
Building Stories can be read as sadder than I am making it out to be, but in MY reading, which would not be yours, I read a heartwarming part of it at the very last of my reading that seemed to be an even greater impulse for the book, he--an awkward, reclusive, shy guy, with a sweet, sad, Charlie Brown face--getting married and having a kid, the greatest event in his life. . . so as I read it, I thought: THIS is the center of the book, the simplest joys of parenthood, the mundane details of those routines. . . including reading, a daily routine for him and me and many parents.
So, brilliant. Spectacular, I'll say it again, in its quiet way. Ware's Jimmy Corrigan was sad, devastatingly so, focused as it is on two sad generations of miserably abusive people, and also brilliant, but my GN students didn't love it, there wasn't enough place for love and happiness, and it didn't have to, it was speaking for the devastatingly lonely with no happy exits, but in this book while you do have some every day misery you also have simple joys and just sheer beauty, and the simple *achieve* of the thing. This is what I always think about Beckett, that he may despair the twentieth century of the Holocaust, of Hiroshima, but he also admires the simple lonely person: "I can't go on, I'll go on." Ware is not Beckett; or he's Beckett with a Charlie Brown face and heart.
10/15: Finished it again, reading it very, very slowly and it is still and even more so a brilliant, anguishing work of art with little places of recognition that there can be joy in "ordinary" life for all his characters. Breathtaking demonstration of what is possible in storytelling in the graphic medium. Just jaw dropping. And not so much fun as a story. But he honors women (a woman in my class said, "I have never seen such realistically drawn women's bodies," not eroticized, but just as they are, engaging in every day activities). Decidedly ordinary women's stories, honoring his grandmother, his wife and child (I am just guessing here), through fictional portraits and snapshots and anecdotes. Motherhood is praised, honored, sympathized with. Some happy parenting moments. Men play a secondary role and often are not here or suck, and sometimes they are good and supportive and wonderful, but we see them through women's eyes, and (I think) this perspective works for Ware.
Definitely check it out! I bet your library has a copy, but as soon as you see it you will have to have it....more
Jason is one of the great comics masters. He plays with genre, so he’ll write about zombies and vampires; he’ll do horror, romance, science fiction. HJason is one of the great comics masters. He plays with genre, so he’ll write about zombies and vampires; he’ll do horror, romance, science fiction. He’s like the Coen Brothers of film fame. He’ll do anything because he loves pop culture. In the Left Bank Gang he sends up literary twenties Paris, with Hemingway and Fitzgerald as graphic novelists forced to support themselves by robbing a bank. Hilarious.
In Why are You Doing This? Jason uses a little bit more dialogue than in many of his other works to conjure up Hitchcock in a suspenseful thriller as told by a minimalist. Sad and scary and touching, with playful twists and turns to satisfy any noir lover.
The protagonist, Alex, recently dumped by his girlfriend, finds his best friend murdered, followed by an attempt to set Alex up for the crime. He escapes to the apartment of a single mother, Geraldine, who lets him stay with them as he tries to clear his name. “Why are you doing this?” he asks her, and we can see it: Any good person would help him out. This is what good people do!
But where is the real killer?! When our sad hero finds him, he asks again, “Why are you doing this?” in a very different situation. I hadn’t read it in years, and now read it twice again, just to see the great tribute he makes to forties noir films. It’s really wonderful comics storytelling. Sad and beautiful. I glanced at one review that mentions him in the same breath as Ingmar Bergman, and I can see it. Compelling portrait of the darkness, accomplished with anthropomorphic animals!...more
Hey, Wait, though an early Jason story, is one of the best of his work, powerful and sad. It is also collected as one of three short volumes in What IHey, Wait, though an early Jason story, is one of the best of his work, powerful and sad. It is also collected as one of three short volumes in What I Did, too. The story is one of childhood tragedy, guilt and regret. Two childhood friends are experiencing the magic of childhood (soccer, gummi bears, climbing trees, “ding dong ditch,” comics, Batman club) and they make decisions about the future: “Never working in a factory.” “Nope, wanna be a comics artist.”
And then something happens that changes their lives forever.
The second half of the book depicts the now completely alone Jon (also the real life name of Jason) as an adult, working in that factory, drinking his evenings away. He does play tennis with a friend, complains about his job with him. Later in the story he meets a girl (now with another guy) he had a crush on that same summer. This has the effect of punctuating the lifelong sentence he is living. The implication is that some people—Jon, in particular—never fully recover from childhood tragedies.
Powerful, minimalist work, many panels, even pages, wordless, creating an emotionally gripping effect. Comics as allusive and subtle poetry. Heartbreaking. But an example of the best work from one of the greatest comics artists ever....more
I guess a lot of people might describe this as "minimalism" and others might call it "odd," and none of them would be wrong, but this book is less minI guess a lot of people might describe this as "minimalism" and others might call it "odd," and none of them would be wrong, but this book is less minimal and less odd than Nilsen's other works. This one is the most narrative, for instance, written over more than fifteen years. . . it's still interlocking fragments, but there is a kind of coherence, or one to be made here that is easier than in earlier works: It's about Big Questions, duh!
And the effect or approach to Big Questions: Yeah, they're "important," but most really important questions can be gotten at/explored, if not answered definitively, through very simple images and stories. . . sort of like Zen Koans or parables, though Nilsen tends to the surreal in his answers to such questions, seems to me. . . or the quirkily amusing, which to me makes sense. I like Ionesco and Beckett, and this MAY be Nilsen's landscape, too. And as with Beckett, there is profundity here. . . I am thinking of Beckett's short plays like Act Without Words. . . or the "minimalist" composer John Cage. I really, really like this work....more
“It's a good world if you don't weaken.” ― Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
This book is a tribute to cartoonists and cartoon history. Seth, a historian of“It's a good world if you don't weaken.” ― Graham Greene, Brighton Rock
This book is a tribute to cartoonists and cartoon history. Seth, a historian of cartoons as well as a famous comic/graphic artist himself, writes this sweet book about an almost unheard of cartoonist from his native Canada he sort of obsesses about, a guy who did cartoons, struggled with it, gave it up. . . it's one of the best works of one of the greatest comics artists alive (that would be Seth, not the cartoonist he is writing about), in my opinion, giving you a perfect blend of nostalgia, depth, beauty, humor, sweetness, darkness.
Seth hangs with his friend Chet Brown through the book. Seth, Chet, Chris Ware, so many of these guys seem similar to me: quiet, contemplative, not obviously all that social, deeply and sometimes quirkily devoted to their art and the history of their profession, nostalgic. . . kind of grumpy, curmudgeonly, misanthropic, sweet, but for me, ultimately compelling.. . . and beautifully, lovingly drawn here... The art, his vision, his attention to line and detail, wow!!...more
I just read this, July 2015, but wrote this review a couple years ago, and pretty much hold to my views then, in spite of the fact that after first reI just read this, July 2015, but wrote this review a couple years ago, and pretty much hold to my views then, in spite of the fact that after first reading this book and loving it, I read each of his previous books and liked them less and less. I basically think he is a pretty good technical writer, smart, loves language, but until this book did not find an important subject to write about. Before this book he was mostly just clever without a real important purpose. His characters all sound like Green himself, smart, literary, and sarcastic, though he can be touching, too. Gus and Hazel sound alike, but they still seem compelling to me. They are smarter than teenagers typically are, by far, prep school kids, but I like what they have to say still.
Another thing: I think Green's main influence in his writing of this story is Peter DeVries's masterpiece about pediatric cancer, The Blood of the Lamb, which is better than Fault, but has that same mashup of bitterness and sardonic humor and vulnerability. I highly recommend that one, too.
This is the October 29, 2012 review:
How do you write a book about kids with cancer and not fall into certain traps? For instance, how do you avoid sentimentality, being maudlin, being "inspirational," etc? Of course, most people LOVE these aspects of books about stories of death, they like to weep, they need hope, etc. I don't want to dismiss those human tendencies, of course. And for some, the sappier the better! But what if you gag on that sickly sweet sap? A host of books attempt to answer this question from a more literary and philosophical point of view, (and a problem not easily solved). Dave Eggers took on the problem in his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, about the sudden and completely out-of-the-blue deaths (from cancer) of his two parents, that left him, a college student, to raise his younger brother alone. Do you cry? Sure, but in the process he grapples seriously with the issue of how to tell the tale without becoming the hero he does not feel he really is. How do you avoid this? Well, he goes meta on us, he talks about the issue with us frankly, and he undermines his own potential heroism (so courageous! How could he possibly live with so much grief and responsibility at such a young age?!!) by making himself out to (also) be a selfish jerk at times, bitter, clueless. He laughs at himself, he gets angry at himself and the world, and everything. Greg Michie's story of his urban teaching, Holler if You Hear Me, works in a similar way to show us how he fails all the time as a teacher... which ironically for both Michie and Eggers actually increases our sympathy for them as heroes....they GET points for being courageous by undermining this very claim about fearful and uncourageous they really are! But I like the move, and their honesty and UNsentimentality increases their credibility.
Green is an often very very good writer, who takes on Eggers's charge to try at all costs to avoid sentimentality, in the service of TRUE sentiment, to get at the core of the really important emotions and ideas working this enterprise we all have to face and face again and again in various ways: death. How does he pull it off? With many strategies; one is wit (which is also the title of a one woman play about a woman with cancer), where the choice of to laugh or to cry is an easy one for Green. He does rage as his characters rage, but he is inclined to find a way to laugh when he can, and the darker the joke, the better, though these jokes also sometimes set up tender scenes, too. He creates teen (and adult) characters who are so smart and so witty and so cynical and so deeply insightful that the sap dries up (almost) everywhere (well, not everywhere, but give him a break, the death from cancer of teens is a tough challenge for even a cynical writer and he is not that cynical, finally).
There are other books like this: Cancer Vixen, Cancer Made Me Shallower, others... I heard a comic with cancer talking on NPR about how she did stand-up the night she had gotten a diagnosis that her cancer had returned... tough, and funny. And the mainstream stories are really about faith, about not giving up, about courage, and while all cancer books do deal with these issues in one way or the other, most of Green's characters are agnostic, existentialist, sometimes (but rarely) bitter, and usually accepting of death as just part of life. They hate the idea of being "inspired" by their cancer. They hate "cancer perks" and false hopes. One central and dearly lovable character, Augustus, does seem to believe in Something, and hopes to come back to visit his funeral, but Green is not taking a position on that, he is himself smart-assedly existentialist, though not a grim one; he admires his kid characters for their commitment to just going on. As Beckett says it, through [I think] Molloy: "I can't go on, I'll go on." Maybe some folks won't like Green as much as Beckett, and I don't, but they have similar purposes: How to face oblivion and the short time we have on the planet usefully.
So yes, spoiler alert, people do die in this book, and you do cry, and yes, you admire the courage and wit and smart assed humor and insight of him and his characters, but you also admire Green himself for writing so beautifully. He really is a good writer, and he supports great human beings over terrible ones. This is YA at its very best, and deserves all the accolades it can get, in my opinion. As he has Augustus, one of the central characters say, "The real heroes aren't the people doing things, they real heroes are the people NOTICING things, the ones paying attention." He's talking about Hazel Grace, our main character, but he's also talking about writers, artists, human beings at their best. Here is Green talking in a meta way to other writers what writing can and must do. I cried reading this book, but sometimes it was just because his writing was so deft, so wonderful, it occasionally took my breath away. That last book that did for me (for me to cry about great writing) was also YA, Okay for Now, by Gary Schmidt, which also very much endorses the importance of art in teen (and generally, human) identity and sense-making. I think Schmidt's book is better, actually, more affecting, even, but I still like Green in this book.
One thing Hazel Grace, the agnostic, says, hanging in a park with her family, reconsidering Augustus's possible view of faith against a favorite writer Peter VanHouten's cynical despair: "Who am I to say that these things might not be forever? Who is Peter VanHouten to assert as fact the conjecture that our labor is temporary? All I know of heaven and all I know of earth is in this park: an elegant universe in ceaseless motion, teeming with ruined ruins and screaming children." Green throughout the book also uses the playing of video games (one kind of storytelling) to mirror his view of what uses fiction and storytelling can contribute to a good life: paying attention. I cried when Hazel Grace recited poetry to Augustus, even the spare William Carlos Williams's "The Red Wheelbarrow": "so much depends/upon/a red wheel/barrow/glazed with rain/water/beside the white/chickens." You are only on the planet so long; pay attention, pay attention, take care of each other....more
Levin (which is what the title should be, since he is the main character, the real hero and the focus of the book!) (But who would read the book with Levin (which is what the title should be, since he is the main character, the real hero and the focus of the book!) (But who would read the book with that title, I know!)
If you don't want to know the ending, don't read this review, though I won't actually talk about what happens to Anna specifically, something I knew 40 years ago without even reading the book. I didn't read the book to find out what happens to her. I knew that. Probably many of you know or knew the ending before reading the book. And this isn't so much a review as a personal reflection. I was tempted, finally, after decades of NOT reading it, to now, approaching my 60th birthday, finish it, all 818 pages, tempted to just simply write: Pretty good! :) But I resist that impulse, sorry (because now, if you so choose to read on, you will have to read many more than those two words. . .).
This is as millions of people have observed over the past 140 years, a really great book, and those of you who are skeptical of reading "Great Books" or "classics" may still not be convinced, but this has in my opinion a deserved reputation of one of the great works of all time, and one of the reasons it IS so good is because it speaks humbly and eloquently against pomposity and perceived or received notions of "greatness." Why do I care about its place in the canon? I guess I really don't. I just think some books deserve the rep they get from the literary establishment, and some deserve the rep they get from the wider reading public. This one is a great literary accomplishment AND a great read, in my opinion, and deserves to be read and read widely by more than just the English major club. And I say this as one who prefers Dostoevsky to Tolstoy; I seem to prefer stories of anguish and doubt to stories of affirmation and faith, and the atheist/agnostic literary club I belong to is maybe always going to favor doubt and anguish over faith and hope and happiness. But to make clear: This surely is a book of faith, of family, of affirmation, of belief in the land, nature, goodness, and simple human joys over the life of "society" with all of its pretension. Yes, all that affirmation is true of the book in spite of what happens to Anna.
I write this in particular contexts, as we all do when we read and write. If I had read this book in my more cynical early twenties, when I actually started it once (and again a few times over my life time and never finished), when I had no kids, I might not have liked it much. If I had read this right after Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamazov, or in the years I was first reading Under the Volcano, Kafka, Camus, what I think of as my existentialist years, I might have found it too. . . life-affirming. But today I have kids, and as seemed to have happened with Chris Ware, as evidenced by his more positive Building Stories, having kids changed everything for me, and in a good way. In harsh times, you need stories of hope and goodness, and Levin's story is a timeless story of hope and goodness.
Another context: I am particularly shaken as I write this by the 20 kids dead in a Connecticut elementary school in Sandy Hook yesterday, with, too, a good teacher, principal, and school psychologist and others who have given their lives to doing good for children, senselessly slaughtered. This is a murderous country, the most murderous in the world, killings devastating my Chicago on a daily basis maybe especially this year, but every damned year. And despair/suicide is possibly more prevalent than ever. Maybe it is time for a bit of reordering priorities toward goodness, and finishing this book as my news feeds gave me updates on the tragedy provides an interesting contrast in experiences, rendering different but altogether persuasive truths about the nature of the world.
Tolstoy was himself, the translator Richard Pevear writes in his fine, brief introduction, in some sense writing a response to the nihilists who were as he saw it in fashion in late nineteenth century Russia, in Moscow, in Europe, in the world. Tolstoy was himself searching for meaning in life and struggling with faith and beliefs in a way he didn't ever struggle about again (or as much) after this book, and the struggle makes for the greatness, in my opinion. His late book Resurrection, by contrast, has none of the struggle about faith that this book has in it. It's mostly a binary world, all Good and Evil, a didactic allegory. Pevear says one of the two main characters, Levin, the country farmer struggling to also write his ideas about farming, is the most fully realized self-portrait that Tolstoy created, and he is on the main pretty delightful. Grumpy at times, stubborn, moody and not witty, a kind of no-nonsense traditionalist I certainly would have been annoyed at regularly if I knew him, Levin is often a kind of comical character, self-deprecatingly clueless as he approaches the Big Events of his life: His brother's death, his proposal to Kitty, the birth of his first child. These are also moments of real angst/anguish and passion and comedy/tragedy, written with great flourish and amazing detail, great sections of the book, pretty thrilling to read, in my opinion.
These are, Tolstoy tells us, in the main what life (and literature) is and should be mainly about, love and death, and they deserve loving attention for us, as are also the striving for goodness and faith. The current art scene of the time, in especially Moscow's theater and art and literature scenes, the world of fashion, the culture of massive-debt-incurring spending on a lavish lifestyle, all this Tolstoy skewers through the comical eyes of the simple farmer Levin, who at his best is so attached to the land, to family, to love, to good talk, and good friendship. But he is not a stereotype, he is a great character, fully realized.
And what can we say of Anna, the other main character, his sort of opposite? Well, if you want to look for what is in some sense a "moral" of this huge tome of a book, this might be it:
“If you look for perfection, you'll never be content.”
Or, if you want to be happy you will want to make choices that Levin makes instead of Anna's tragic choices--but Anna, in having been originally intended by Tolstoy (thanks to Pevear here for his introduction) as an immoral woman, a woman corrupted by city values, is never really only that, any more than Levin can be seen as a holy man. Tolstoy is creating literature here, not a didactic tract, and we see all along that Tolstoy falls in love with Anna as she emerges through his creation of her in his novel, and she is thus for him and us real and fascinating, a human being, and a wondrous one in many ways, one of the great women of literature, without question. You don't have to agree with her choices or like her, but she will come to life for you as few characters ever will. And many of you will fall in love with her as Tolstoy did. As I did, I'll admit.
There's one time Tolstoy has his two main characters meet, and this is a great evening, where the simple Levin actually is obviously attracted to Anna in so many ways, and not just the physical attraction all men and women seem to have for her. Levin, like Tolstoy, sees that Anna is vital, viscerally alive, she's fascinating, interesting; okay, she IS a romantic heroine, but she is a romantic heroine that anyone reading romances should read. The women of Wuthering Heights, Jane Eyre, Anna Karenina, Madame Bovary, these are "romances" but they are all so much more, that sweep you into the world in richer and deeper ways. Anna Karenina is, like War and Peace, like The Brothers Karamazov, a rich cultural forum, a series of linked meditations on farming and politics and religion and family and relationships and war and the meaning of life, not just about sex and romance. You get so much out of it, as it is all about reflecting on and teaching you how the mundane aspects of our lives are worth paying attention to (I know the bulk of readers absolutely hate the farming and politics sections of the book, but I would contend it is all relevant to Tolstoy's webbed narrative reflection on the meaning of life).
And Anna, in the very center of this tale, as a kind of twin contrast to Levin, but not a simple one (they are both suicidal at times; they both are moody and struggle and are essentially lonely for much of the book), is one shimmering, tragic character we can't simply dismiss for submitting to and crushing her life (as she does) through lust for Vronsky. We come to understand her well, we come to understand why she does what she does and why we must pity her and even support her, love her. I know a lot of people have not come to this position about her, they dismiss her as a shallow twit who throws her life away for an also shallow, callous dashing fellow, but in the end we even come to like Vronsky and pity him, and admire his resilience. He IS also an attractive character, in many ways, in spite of his shallow aspects. And maybe we are even sympathetic for them in this forbidden, unwise love. I know I am. We care for them.
Of the other main characters, I liked Kitty, Levin's wife (who deals with the dying of her husband's brother so deftly as opposed to her clueless husband) a lot, and who becomes attracted to Vronsky too in a way as so may women seem to do. Levin's two brothers are both great, and provide the basis for rich conversations. The Dolly/Oblonsky pair are yet another view of a married relationship. I even like the portrait of the sad, stiff Karenin, the diplomat we can see is a good man, certainly not a great lover for Anna, but we see his struggles and come to feel sorry for him, I think. He's not an ideal match for the passionate Anna, maybe, but he's a good and essentially blameless man. I like all the minor characters we get to meet, too, the people Tolstoy finds more genuine than all the upper crust he mocks and derides and, you know, also cares about. This is a great book, my friends, with some great characters and great scenes.
And now to the movie? I read one blurb that said without Tolstoy's gorgeous writing, any movie version of Anna Karenina will only be a soap opera, and that is what I feared. . . and that is what I found in seeing it. The movie couldn't begin to capture Tolstoy's reflections on life and love and birth and death. It was a melodrama, a good one but not great or rich as the novel.
And what do English readers miss, as my friends who read Russian and have grown up reading his prose IN Russia say? That his use of the Russian language is unparalleled, gorgeous, breathtaking. Well, I don't know the language in which Tolstoy wrote, but this translation of his tale is pretty amazing, I think. But in any language, read it, my friends.
PS I have also recently read Madame Bovary, which I also liked in spite of the main character's (also) bad choices. I liked Anna K even more, though....more
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