Heartbreaking and timely.
This graphic novel from author Bessora, illustrator Barroux (How Many Trees?, 2019, etc.), and translator Ardizzone follows a migrant’s arduous journey from West Africa to Europe.
Alpha is a cabinetmaker in the Ivory Coast who wants to take his family to visit his sister-in-law in Paris, but he runs into a mountain of red tape when applying for a visa. “When you leave the consulate, one thing’s for sure—you understand that Côte d’Ivoire loves France more than France loves Côte d’Ivoire,” explains Alpha, before wryly adding, “But, seeing as Côte d’Ivoire doesn’t love its own people very much either, Ivorians still flee for Europe.” So Alpha goes into debt to pay a smuggler to start his wife and son on their journey to France. Six months later, Alpha sells his cabinet shop to pay yet another smuggler in hopes of following his family's path. The book has the appearance of a photo album, most pages presenting a stack of two equal-sized, rectangular images with a short paragraph of Alpha’s deeply human narration beneath each illustration, documenting his journey. As Alpha quickly learns, the road out of Africa is beset with con men, drunken soldiers, endless dusty desert, and death—but also kindred spirits. Barroux’s illustrations have a deceptively simple quality, with heavy lines and people with dots for eyes and bulbous, shiny noses; that simplicity makes an ill migrant’s hollow stare or the stiff joints of a body left to rot all the more haunting. Bessora is a fiction writer whose work “is underpinned by extensive research,” according to the author bio, though the origin of this story is unspecified. It is a compelling tale, though major events transpire in the text-only epilogue, which is delivered by an omniscient narrator rather than Alpha, robbing the conclusion of some of its heft.
Heartbreaking and timely.Pub Date: May 1, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-942658-40-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Bellevue Literary Press
Review Posted Online: April 13, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2019
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.
Design veteran Chwast delivers another streamlined, graphic adaptation of classic literature, this time Mark Twain’s caustic, inventive satire of feudal England.
Chwast (Tall City, Wide Country, 2013, etc.) has made hay anachronistically adapting classic texts, whether adding motorcycles to The Canterbury Tales (2011) or rocket ships to The Odyssey (2012), so Twain’s tale of a modern-day (well, 19th-century) engineer dominating medieval times via technology—besting Merlin with blasting powder—is a fastball down the center. (The source material already had knights riding bicycles!) In Chwast’s rendering, bespectacled hero Hank Morgan looks irresistible, plated in armor everywhere except from his bow tie to the top of his bowler hat, sword cocked behind head and pipe clenched in square jaw. Inexplicably sent to sixth-century England by a crowbar to the head, Morgan quickly ascends nothing less than the court of Camelot, initially by drawing on an uncanny knowledge of historical eclipses to present himself as a powerful magician. Knowing the exact date of a celestial event from more than a millennium ago is a stretch, but the charm of Chwast’s minimalistic adaption is that there are soon much better things to dwell on, such as the going views on the church, politics and society, expressed as a chart of literal back-stabbing and including a note that while the upper class may murder without consequence, it’s kill and be killed for commoners and slaves. Morgan uses his new station as “The Boss” to better the primitive populous via telegraph lines, newspapers and steamboats, but it’s the deplorably savage civility of the status quo that he can’t overcome, even with land mines, Gatling guns and an electric fence. The subject of class manipulation—and the power of passion over reason—is achingly relevant, and Chwast’s simple, expressive illustrations resonate with a childlike earnestness, while his brief, pointed annotations add a sly acerbity. His playful mixing of perspectives within single panels gives the work an aesthetic somewhere between medieval tapestry and Colorforms.
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-961-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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