novella
Active Member
Just finished In the Shadow of No Towers, the new Art Spiegelman book. (He wrote Maus.)
It's a tough book to 'get' for many reasons. First, the format is a very large cardboard-paged trimsize, as awkward to read as the funny papers in a way (surely that's the intention?).
Then, the strips are very disjointed, jumping around a lot, with text behind and around, like a wired Wired. Some speak directly to Spiegelman's experience, and others are about or feature really old classic comic strips and characters.
It's a quick read, if you just treat it as a superficial entertainment, but I will read it again, as I suspect most people who bother with it will. Probably a lot of times.
The central theme is angst and grief. It's blessedly free of lecturing and bombastic hero-mongering. For me, the message mostly seems to be about holding on to the things you know to be true. It cuts straight into media manipulations and some odd human behaviors that are both ubiquitous and disturbing. For instance, it looks sideways at the compulsion to turn raw tragedy into a heroic epic narrative that is completely alien to the original experience, as well as the distortion of reality for political and material gain at every level.
I think Spiegelman wants above all to be honest in this.
I'm interested to hear what other people think.
novella
It's a tough book to 'get' for many reasons. First, the format is a very large cardboard-paged trimsize, as awkward to read as the funny papers in a way (surely that's the intention?).
Then, the strips are very disjointed, jumping around a lot, with text behind and around, like a wired Wired. Some speak directly to Spiegelman's experience, and others are about or feature really old classic comic strips and characters.
It's a quick read, if you just treat it as a superficial entertainment, but I will read it again, as I suspect most people who bother with it will. Probably a lot of times.
The central theme is angst and grief. It's blessedly free of lecturing and bombastic hero-mongering. For me, the message mostly seems to be about holding on to the things you know to be true. It cuts straight into media manipulations and some odd human behaviors that are both ubiquitous and disturbing. For instance, it looks sideways at the compulsion to turn raw tragedy into a heroic epic narrative that is completely alien to the original experience, as well as the distortion of reality for political and material gain at every level.
I think Spiegelman wants above all to be honest in this.
I'm interested to hear what other people think.
novella