THE WAY OF THE WORLD | Nicolas Bouvier

Suffused with a painterly quality, and a deft, deeply observant touch, The Way of the World is a remarkable account of a meandering, eighteen-month journey from Geneva to the Khyber Pass, undertaken by the writer Nicolas Bouvier and the artist Thierry Vernet in 1953.

Setting out in an old, restored Fiat, these two young men – both in their early twenties at the time – chalked out an itinerary as loose as it was unhurried, but underlined with an inner urgency nonetheless: “We had two years in front of us, and money for four months. The programme was vague; the main thing was just to get going … When desire resists commonsense’s first objections, we look for reasons – and find that they’re no use. We really don’t know what to call this inner compulsion. Something grows, and loses its moorings, so that the day comes when, none too sure of ourselves, we nevertheless leave for good.”

First published as L’Usage du monde in 1963, it took until 1992 for the book to first appear in English. [The current NYRB edition is based on the eminently readable translation by Robyn Marsack, and accompanied by sumptuously inky drawings from Thierry Vernet.] Puzzlingly enough, it remained relatively obscure at the time of its first publishing in English (not so to French readers, who hold Bouvier in high regard). This is made all the more curious after being led into one of the book’s innumerable, lushly evocative passages: “Imagine a room with bulging walls, torn curtains, cool as a cave, where flies buzzed around in a strong smell of onions. The day would find its centre there: elbows on the table, we’d make an inventory, telling the story of the morning as though we’d each seen it separately. The mood of the day, which had been dissipated by the acres of countryside, was focused by those first mouthfuls of wine, by the paper cloth to draw on, by the words formulated then.” And upon conjuring up such a palpably rich sense of place, he proceeds – with rather astonishing frequency, throughout the book – to make it glow: “The end of the day would be silent. We had spoken our fill while eating. Carried along on the hum of the motor and the countryside passing by, the journey itself flows through you and clears your head. Ideas one had held on to without any reason depart; others, however, are readjusted and settle like pebbles at the bottom of a stream. There’s no need to interfere: the road does the work for you. One would like to think that it stretches out like this, dispensing its good offices, not just to the ends of India but even further, until death.”

A traveller born – in his youth, Bouvier made his way to various extremities of Europe, from Nordic climes to the Egyptian desert – this journey led him from Switzerland through Yugoslavia, Greece, Turkey, Iran, with a brief sojourn in western Pakistan, and on into Afghanistan. Employing an approach to travel that was easy-going to the point of absurdity, Bouvier and Vernet made it a habit to stop whenever the wish to tarry took a-hold of them; at times this stretched on for months on end. In this, they were well served by their reinterpretation of travel by car as a kind of extended automotive amble: “We denied ourselves every luxury except one, that of being slow.  With the top down, the accelerator only just pulled out, perching on the backs of our seats and guiding the steering wheel with our feet, we pottered along at twelve miles an hour. The countryside never changed without warning; there was a full moon, rich and prodigious … Then day broke, and time slowed down.”

The slow joy Bouvier takes in describing every instance of his environment – be it his introduction to the vastness of Asia, or the bustling view from his courtyard – never slides into a mere cataloguing of grandeur or difference. With a superb eye for observation and human character, the pictures he writes unfurl into heady bloom. Bouvier’s prose is most closely matched by the notion of painting: with simple, honest strokes, he fashions the world as it appeared – and more importantly, felt – to him at the time. The result is always a pleasure, and at times sublime:

“After the furnace of the road from Salonica to Alexandroúpolis, what a pleasure to sit in front of a white tablecloth, on a little quay with smooth, round cobblestones. For an instant the fried fish gleamed like gold ingots on our plates, then the sun sank below a purple sea and drained the colour away.

I thought of those loud lamentations with which primitive civilisations accompanied the death of light each evening, and suddenly they seemed so appropriate that I was prepared to hear behind me a whole village in tears.

But no, not a one. Apparently they had got used to it.”

This fluid pairing of little turns of phrase and thought with vividly poetic descriptions of geography and character help give the book its singular character: that of a painterly travel-log overflowing with luminous musings, that begin as delicate observational pieces, and then segue effortlessly into a realm of story and metaphor:

“Time passed in brewing tea, the odd remark, cigarettes, then dawn came up. The widening light caught the plumage of quails and partridges… and quickly I dropped this wonderful moment to the bottom of my memory, like a sheet-anchor that one day I could draw up again. You stretch, pace to and fro feeling weightless, and the word ‘happiness’ seems too thin and limited to describe what has happened.

 In the end, the bedrock of existence is not made up of the family, or work, or what others say or think of you, but of moments like this when you are exalted by a transcendent power that is more serene than love. Life dispenses them parsimoniously; our feeble hearts could not stand more.”

 In stark contrast to these distilled, meditative moments is the nature of the journey itself: by necessity, improvised – and delightfully so – all the way through. Bouvier and Vernet begin with just enough funds to ensure a good start, and what with the former being a writer and the latter an artist, the plan thereafter is to earn their way, selling their work and services when possible, and scheming harmlessly when they must. Predictably, things are somewhat shaky at times. But as the author happily notes, “… If we didn’t have customers, friends sprouted from under our feet. There was an immense store of personal generosity … and though lacking so much, people were warm-hearted.” To sustain such a life for so long requires no small measure of boldness, a leap of faith, even. However – as demonstrated by their travels – things do work themselves out: friends, stories, sights, and yes, even food and shelter present themselves in times of actual need. And the rewards are odd and unforeseen: hurtling around on trucks “pitching over the bare earth like monstrous bouquets;” holidaying with an amiable warden as ‘prison-guests’; becoming the impromptu centre of an improbable salon congregating at a garage; landing a gig at an oddly sophisticated bar in the mountains of Baluchistan; or receiving safe passage through much of Iran, thanks entirely to a couplet by Hafiz painted on the car-door:

         Even if your night’s shelter is uncertain

         and your goal is still far away

         know that there doesn’t exist

         a road without an end –

         don’t be sad

Or perhaps, to simply stay on in Tehran, solely in order to sit under “plane trees such as one had only dreamed of, enormous trees, each broad enough to shade a few little cafés where you could happily spend a lifetime;” to then learn first-hand, that “Above all, there was the blue. You have to go that far to discover blue … in shop doorways, on horses’ halters, in cheap jewellery – everywhere there is this inimitable Persian blue which lifts the heart, which keeps Iran afloat…”

 A particularly pertinent aspect of The Way of the World that bears emphasis in these times is Bouvier’s willingness to explore and engage, to see each place and its people afresh; a capacity that enables the book – now nearly half a century distant – to give due honour to the refinement and warmth of Iran and Afghanistan. And this is in turn allows us to forget, for a brief time, the strange, painful – and seemingly irrevocable – distortions that continue to hold sway in both these proud nations. Instead, Bouvier pens a quiet celebration of a graceful world that one can only hope might someday re-emerge, where poetry, charm and light-heartedness endure, where “noble old men fall off their Raleigh bikes, doubled up with laughter, because a joke tossed from a shop had tickled their fancy;” and “respected men would willingly undertake a week’s journey to taste the famous white melons of Bokhara.” Being a deeply compassionate glimpse of an already fading time is, at the very least, reason enough to peruse this book. 

Put simply, The Way of the World is an ode to the voyager that echoes in us all; an encouragement to stroll down a path where wonders may “just as well spring from an oversight, or a sin, or a catastrophe which, breaking the normal run of events, offers life unexpected scope for unfolding its splendours before eyes that are always ready to rejoice in them.” And somewhere along this way, the dream of a life lived with an elegance bordering on magical begins to reveal itself:

“Night had almost fallen, the sky was covered over. As I got up to see whether rain was coming on, old M––, who had taken the art of living calmly to its utmost degree, pulled me back gently by the sleeve.

         ‘If it’s raining, the cat will come back inside.’”

…

Text by David Mathews

Biblio: A Review of Books, July - August 2010

Picture from China Illustrata

ATHANASIUS KIRCHER’S THEATRE OF THE WORLD | Jocelyn Godwin

‘The world is bound by secret knots’  – Athanasius Kircher

The Jesuit scholar Athanasius Kircher (1602-1680) is one of history’s more intriguing figures. Possessed of a profound erudition – a cursory selection of his interests includes mathematics, physics, magnetism, music, philosophy, astronomy, geology, cartography, zoology, archaeology, Egyptology and Sinology – he achieved great renown in his own time, and yet, has slid into a near-total obscurity.

As Alan Cutler tells us in The Seashell on the Mountaintop (Penguin, 2003),

“Hardly remembered today, Kircher was a giant among seventeenth-century scholars. Straddling the divide between the expansive scholarship of the Renaissance and the focused data-collecting of the emerging scientific age, he was one of the last thinkers who could rightfully claim all knowledge as his domain.”

Some of Kircher’s better-known work includes: proposing that the earth was riddled with channels of fire and water, after lowering himself into an active volcano to observe its inner workings; a scientific demonstration of the folly of the tower of Babel; determining that germs were the cause of disease.

Kircher’s lasting legacy, however, has been his prodigious outpouring of scientific tomes, copiously illustrated – at times fantastically so – by a variety of highly-skilled artists, in order to better articulate his often startling and marvellous postulations (the dragons of China; subterranean fires coursing through the earth; a map of the sun).It is both the rich imagery in these books as well as the man behind them that form the focus of Joscelyn Godwin’s recent book, Athanasius Kircher’s Theatre of the World. Godwin, a Professor of Music at Colgate University, is a long-time Kircher scholar, and proves to be a hugely knowledgeable and delightfully droll guide to this fascinating seventeenth-century personification of the intersection of science, art and the imagination. And a guide is imperative: as Godwin tells us, “…in order for modern people to enjoy this kind of activity, most of them need a helping hand across the gulf of history, culture, religion and erudition that yawns between Kircher’s age and ours…”

It is hard not to wonder how a figure of such esteemed standing could disappear so completely from popular scientific history. The Museum of Jurassic Technology in Los Angeles, one of the few contemporary institutions to feature a long-standing exhibit dedicated to Kircher, throws some light on this:

“A contemporary of Newton, Boyle, Leibniz and Descartes, Kircher’s rightful place in the history of science has been shrouded by his attempt to forge a unified world view out of traditional Biblical historicism and the emerging secular scientific theory of knowledge.” (http://www.mjt.org)

And this is worth dwelling on: his unending quest for knowledge was inextricably coupled with a strictly Catholic background, at a time when western science was beginning to loosen itself from the shackles of the church. This proved disastrous for Kircher’s scientific standing in the long run, as he became increasingly isolated within an archaic tradition that insisted on subsuming science to further the ends of religion. In addition to this, as Godwin tells us, Kircher’s very way of working was to fall by the wayside:

“The academies instituted a new way of gathering and diffusing knowledge that has remained valid to the present day. Through collaborative research, peer review (instituted by Oldenburg) and periodical publication, findings could be shared, commented on and added to in a continuous self-correcting process. Kircher’s method of compiling facts through erudition and correspondence and enshrining them in encyclopaedic works could not compete. While the motor of the new science was conversation, Kircher’s was a monologue.”

Of course, the vaster portion of his writings has been relegated to the status of an oddity, as his innate obligation to take the bible literally “… acted as a straitjacket on Kircher’s brilliant mind.” And though he “… was at the centre of the world’s most efficient and best-educated network” (The Society of Jesus), he was also “… prone to believe every report that came in his mailbag.”  But it is precisely these qualities, coupled with an indefatigable spirit of enquiry, “… that make(s) him so fascinating and, for all his apparent oddness, probably more representative of his times than any of the canonized saints of progress.”

Making the utmost of his situation, station, and formidable intellect, Athanasius Kircher embarked on a life-long, all-encompassing scientific enterprise of a most improbable scale. And though the empirical value of his work has long since been consigned to the dusty hallways of forgotten science, his books continue to embody a singular bent of mind, seamlessly blending together the worlds of science, theology and the fantastic.

 …

Text by David Mathews

Adapted from a piece in the Vienna Review, March 2009

1969 Enfield Bullet

ARTICULATE IRON

Puttering slowly along on rural byroads in Maharashtra, engaged in a kind of mechanised perambulation, it occurred to me then that there was no finer way to traverse this land than by motorcycle. It is the mode of transport that best enables you to see and savour the wealth of difference and wonder – in geography, in human character – from one state to the next.

Modern travel, with all its systems of efficiency, is often harsh to the dawdling traveller. And there is something of the dawdler in all of us – at one point or another, we have all wished to go down some enticing little road to see where it leads, or to stop and take the time to delight in a remarkable landscape.

This summer, I set out from Chennai to reach Delhi, astride the most fitting of vehicles for such an endeavour: a 1984 Enfield Bullet. It was a solid and regal thing on which I had previously ridden to Hampi; at the time, as I rode through the rambling, magnificent ruins, it seemed as though I was on an iron steed equal to the stateliness of the occasion.

The Bullet has long been an intrinsic part of the Indian vehicular fabric. Doing away with electronics entirely – or more accurately, never quite getting to them in the first place – it has been in continuous production for over sixty years, and remains much as it was when it first appeared. A machine built for the ages, it employs an economy of design rarely seen in the vehicles of today, with a purity of form and function that speaks to all.

And then there is that blissfully singular sound; a thumping roar of power, possessed of an almost animal magic.

To get the most out of an Enfield, an interest in details is a must. N.S. Seshanaath, one of the finest exponents of Enfield repair (based out of Taramani, Chennai), is adamant about the extensive care needed to properly run in and maintain a Bullet, whether new or old. And though it may seem tiresome, a Bullet is much like a living thing, in that it needs to be nurtured into its full potential. As Florian Wille – an Austrian designer who frequents the subcontinent – wryly observes, an Enfield has to be introduced to the concept of speed. But make no mistake: once this is seen to, it is a wild thing indeed.

It is on the wide-open roads, stretching and winding their way through the countryside, that all falls into place. A moment of detachment arrives, where the road becomes a river, where the asphalt no longer seems rough and unforgiving, but is instead a grey and fluid thing. And here, a thing so monstrously imposing is able to lay bare its refined nature; shifting the weight of your hips ever so slightly, more a suggestion of movement than actual motion, the motorcycle responds with the graceful fluency of a dancer, moving on the road in almost liquid fashion. And on smaller, less-frequented roads a further bliss awaits; in this motion removed from all sense of urgency, achieved entirely without exertion, one is embraced by and immersed in the landscape.

Once almost exclusively the province of large, often fiercely-mustachioed, middle-aged men, almost as imposing as the vehicle itself, the Bullet has seen a sea change take place in its rider demographic over the past fifteen years. There has been a welcome surge in the number of younger riders, now seen thundering about in every major city. Additionally, there is the multitude of travellers rumbling through the entire country, particularly in the areas of Himachal, Goa, and Pondicherry. Hari Saravanan, an ethnographer who uses his Enfield to do field research, also tells of young women in Bihar riding around in salwar-kameez on Bullets, lending a previously unknown and much-needed poetry to the image of motorcycling.

I hear of increasingly fantastic journeys. Take Barack, a young American who had ridden down from Goa to Auroville, and spoke of eventually riding up to Nepal; or the two Dutch friends who rode their Bullets all the way from India to Holland.

These stories beg the question as to what exactly the fascination with the Bullet consists of; immediately evident is the physical rush and concurrent quieting of the mind on offer. But there is also the idea of abandon, of a near-boundless freedom. And an increasing number of people have come to see it as an embodiment and direct line to a way (or rather, a dream) of life, that of the carefree traveller, beholden to none but whimsy and chance.

Of course, one can argue that this is a rather illusory freedom; it requires little enough to prick this bubble of independence and self-reliance – a carburettor inexplicably spewing fuel or an ominously rattling engine will do just fine. Being wholly reliant on the welfare of an external object, it is a freedom very much tied down to luck and timing. And yet, as soon as one is back on the road, the joy returns, potent as ever.

To me, the attraction is simple enough: rather than speak of being unfettered, I see it as becoming an extension of something altogether finer; to meld with iron made articulate.
…

Text and image by David Mathews
The New Sunday Express, 29/11/09

Picture © Martin tom Dieck

VORTEX | Martin tom Dieck

A wordless pean to water in all its fluid variants, and to the old warehouse district in the port city of Hamburg, Vortex is a story that celebrates – and is driven by – the drawn image.

First published by Arrache Coeur in 1997, it is one of the quieter milestones in the development of graphic fiction; breaking wholly new ground in terms of the form that a story told in pictures can take.

The book seems to be exempt from the usual tenets of narrative, and the story told is delightfully vague; there is no object to be acquired, no obvious goal to be pursued. Character development is not present in any meaningful way, and the story itself is somewhat mystifying to say the least. This is not to say that nothing takes place – the book abounds in incident, but specifics are never spelled out. Actions are embarked on, events take place; but their purpose and history is left unsaid for the most part.

But to focus on this seeming lack of fit with conventional narrative is to lose sight of the fact that Vortex is an entirely different kind of story, one with a wonderfully extempore feel to it. Though visual, it is experienced more in the manner of an aural object; the lush full-page illustrations taking the place of music, allowing for a narrative that ceaselessly flows, rising and subsiding as it does so. A significant indicator of the nature of the story can be found on the first page, in a quote from the 4th century Chinese thinker, Chuang Tze – “The murmuring water speaks my thoughts.”

There is a story of sorts, albeit one situated on the edge of the reader’s peripheral vision. A man in a canoe drifts through watery byways, and then proceeds to investigate the worn city he is floating through. The waters suddenly rise and flood, then just as quickly return to placidity. A second man appears, executing decisive actions of an unclear nature. Clouds gather; rain falls, then pours; a watery apocalypse seems imminent. The two protagonists meet, and an offering of sorts is made. The waters recede, and all is still once more.

There is an important catch here, though: this cursory summation of the narrative belies its single most important aspect – the drawings. Done entirely in black and white, they are a sustained and astounding exploration of mark-making – clean, decisive lines; masterfully controlled hatching; liquid, shimmering pools of black; dry, scruffily textured patches; large, bold swathes of black and white; forms evoked through an absence of ink. Vortex is drawing unfettered, deployed without limits, teetering beautifully on the edge of abstraction and representation. It is an inspiring testament to the evocative power of the drawn image; an entire library on the potential of drawing with ink.

In the midst of this virtuoso display of picture-making, the gentle and constant narrative thrust – evident throughout the book – builds to a crescendo; the various little meanderings of story come together, gathering momentum to become a torrent, leaving it to conclude in a literal storm of ink.

Which begs the question: does one “read” (in the sense of following a narrative) the book, or simply look at it? The answer excludes neither option, which is why Vortex is a triumph for drawing and storytelling combined. Once begun, the reader’s passage through the book is as inexorable as with a piece of compelling music; listening, one is pulled into it, only becoming aware of having travelled when it is at an end. And as with music, questions of meaning and intent become secondary; the primary thing is the work, and the feeling it leaves you with.
…

Text by David Mathews
The New Indian Express, 04/07/09

Picture © King Features

KRAZY & IGNATZ | George Herriman

For an uninterrupted stretch of three decades (1913-1944), it was a cat that held court in the funny pages of the Hearst newspaper empire. Appearing as a 4-panel comic strip on weekdays, and occupying an entire newspaper page on Sundays, Krazy Kat is that most unlikely of things: poetry fostered and cared for unquestioningly by commerce.

The early part of the twentieth-century was an especially fertile period for the nascent medium of the comic strip; a time made possible entirely due to the explosive growth in newspaper-readership, during which George Herriman’s Krazy Kat took form. The central premise of the strip is evident even on a cursory reading – the primary cast is formed by Krazy Kat, a tender-hearted and whimsical cat; Ignatz, an irritable, conniving mouse; and Offisa Pupp, a stoutly resolute dog who functions as the resident arm of the law. Ignatz’s chief pleasure is lobbing bricks at Krazy; who, being in love with Ignatz, profoundly misinterprets (and seeks out) these missiles to the head as tokens of a lasting love. Offisa Pupp, possessed of a deep fondness for Krazy, cannot bear to see the Kat being battered with bricks – perceiving this act, as indeed most would, to be far from beneficial to Krazy – and so, sees it as his constant task to foil Ignatz’s brick-hurlings.

From this seeming tangle arose a near-immutable mechanics of misunderstanding; each player was party to the other’s strivings, without ever grasping the true nature of this bizarre triangle. For this to be the heart of the strip may seem more than a little repetitive – but it proved a slim and constant anchor, allowing the rest to soar into a world of whimsy unlike any other, before or since. Herriman was a man given leave to dream, in that most public of forums, the American newspaper.

Despite his constantly ingenious and engaging experimentation with the comic-strip form – or perhaps because of it – the strip’s later years saw a steadily mounting stream of protestations from readers and editors alike about its obstinately strange and obscure nature. The complaint was not entirely unwarranted: Krazy Kat defies the popular understanding of a commercial comic strip’s innate obligation (not quite set in stone at this early point in the medium’s history) – to innocuously entertain and help sell papers. Instead, the strip took another route: Language, as deployed by Krazy, is a fluid and fantastic thing, a patois from a people of one. It plays a vital role in setting the tone of the strip, confronting the reader with an endearing jumble of dialects and phonetically spelled words, with English giving way to Spanish, with occasional smatterings of Yiddish, and so on with no distinct end in sight. And yet, Krazy’s speech is no parodic pastiche of language; it has a poetical allure and a cadence all its own.

The art, rendered in scratchy quill and ink, is personal to the point of being more akin to a kind of visual handwriting than a stylised way of rendering the world on paper. The landscapes and patterns in the panel backgrounds, drawn from Herriman’s love of Navajo culture, vary with such speed so as to seem almost liquid. Each full-page comic forms an astutely considered whole; his compositions remain an innovative delight even today.

As Bill Watterson – creator of Calvin and Hobbes, one of the more lastingly lovely newspaper comic-strips in recent memory – so finely observed: “The constraint of Krazy Kat’s narrow plot seems to have set free every other aspect of the cartoon to become poetry, and the strip is, to my mind, cartooning at its most pure.”

A world of fantasy and elastic language appears, where the unvarying central theme is but the foundation for a sublimely layered edifice of cartooning, every instance of which is suffused with an inexplicable freshness, one that was held to for the entirety of its thirty-year run.

This, as any storyteller will readily admit, is nothing short of miraculous.
…

Text by David Mathews
The New Indian Express, 06/06/09

Picture © Hayao Miyazaki

NAUSICAÄ OF THE VALLEY OF THE WIND | Hayao Miyazaki

Internationally renowned for directing anime under the banner of Studio Ghibli, Hayao Miyazaki has been responsible for classics of animation such as Spirited Away and My Neighbour Totoro – films that are without parallel in their evocation of a reality infused with the gently fantastic.

And yet, in his native Japan, he is equally revered for his first (and only) manga, Nausicaä of the Valley of the Wind. Set in a future entirely ravaged by the warring hand of man, in a time well past humanity’s prime, the greater part of the earth is now occupied by the ‘Sea of Corruption’, an ever-spreading, fatally toxic forest, populated by monstrous, insectoid creatures. In sharp and nearly hopeless contrast to this now vicious world, tiny pockets of human habitation lie scattered across the planet, one of these being the relatively idyllic kingdom of the Valley of the Wind, home of the eponymous princess Nausicaä. The valley’s idyll, however, is a precarious one; the Sea of Corruption continually threatens to swallow their land, and the precious few other human habitations are, to put it mildly, reluctant to let go of their old warring follies.

Thus, the stage is set for a tale that is epic in stature, rising in scope from each volume to the next (there are seven in total), spiralling impossibly higher and higher, never once subsiding into obvious contrivances of storytelling. Written and drawn over a period of twelve years, the sheer page-count of Nausicaä allowed Miyazaki to invest his characters with remarkably layered inner natures; villainy is never irrevocable, no matter what horrors it might have had a hand in, and goodness in all its guises is given the chance to be flawed and entirely mistaken. Which makes, of course, for a wonderfully unpredictable and compelling read.

The vast sweep of the story is breathtaking in its ability to absorb and evoke - in such potent fashion so as to feel bewilderingly real - myriad manifestations of the human condition; among those that spring immediately to mind are injustice, cruelty, fleeting joy, sacrifice, mortality and the wish for peace. Nature itself appears as the living presence at the centre of this seeming tumult, at once terrifying in its unpredictability and benign in the grander, kindlier scheme that it embodies. The world drawn into being in these pages is whole in every sense; varying facets (not always flattering) are brought constantly to light, ranging from the sublime to the simply brutal. For the reader, the expansive range of the emotional texture traversed results in a near-total immersion. The story’s enormous and unrelenting power allows it to engineer that rare shift: a tale whose telling moves the reader from an engaging form of spectatorship into the realm of the profoundly felt.

Staggering in its density and scope, Nausicaä houses a narrative so tightly woven that a casual glance threatens to overwhelm. And yet, on closer inspection, the detail and fluidity of the drawings (done in pen and ink) becomes readily apparent, though they never detract from the story, nor call undue attention to themselves. Despite this, in the most unlikely and restricted of spaces, Miyazaki cannot help but form pictures that - being so seamlessly integrated with and subsumed to the service of the story - seem to sing with grace and economy.

Coming in at well over a thousand pages, Nausicaä amounts to an extended - and magnificently readable - meditation on the capacity of humanity to redeem itself, shot through with fantastic ecology and strange science. Never obviously moralistic in tone, it nonetheless comes to a close as a story so powerfully told that the reader cannot help but sit up and listen.

…

Text by David Mathews
The New Indian Express, 14/03/09

Picture © Shaun Tan

THE ARRIVAL | Shaun Tan

Straddling the divide between children’s picture book and adult graphic novel to splendid effect, The Arrival, by Australian illustrator Shaun Tan, is one of those rare beasts: a wholly graphic fiction, that dispenses with the use of words entirely. Rare, because it is so remarkably difficult – when attempting to tell an engaging and comprehensible story solely in pictures - to avoid a descent into monotonous exposition.

The story begins in a nameless land, with the scene being set for the departure of a man from his wife and daughter. It becomes apparent that he is leaving for a time, not out of animosity, but as a temporary necessity. As the family emerge from the house, and walk the father to a train station, we witness dark, serpentine forms writhing along above drab streets, yet nobody seems to attend to them in any way. Whether these images of the mundane fused with the unsettling are to be taken literally or as metaphor is not entirely clear; what is certain is that the very air itself carries a ceaseless, unwelcome weight. The protagonist – a tired and gentle sort of everyman – departs. And this is where the story takes wing.

We see him cross an ocean, and arrive in a new land. From the arcane rituals of categorisation he is subjected to upon entry, to the initially unfathomable nature of what should by all rights be a kitchen tap, he finds himself in a world whose signs and habits he is quite unable to read. It is here that Tan’s wordless approach comes into its own, working entirely to the story’s favour; upon arrival in a new land, it is the simplest thing to be lost for words.

His everyday confrontation with the otherness of the city finds a fitting amplification in the wonderfully inventive pictures of Shaun Tan – and in amongst all the visual strangeness, a vocabulary of forms and patterns emerges; serving to reinforce the fantastic reality of this new world. Gradually, he begins to learn how some things work, and where other things are – at times through persisting in his endeavours, at other times through the kindness of his fellow city-folk. His life undergoes a blossoming of sorts, as both the place and its people open up to him. And all the way along, in every event and circumstance that he encounters, there is a carefully placed, wonderfully recognisable echo for the reader, young and old alike, to uncover and relate to.

Intricately and realistically rendered in pencil and lush charcoal tones, with each panel bathed in a soft and slightly hazy glow, the book cultivates a carefully worn and aged aesthetic. To ensure a seamless reading experience, many hundreds of individual pictures are necessarily put to service – and this is accomplished with a blisteringly capable understanding of visual narrative, of what the reader’s eye needs to see, and where on the page it needs to be seen. And not once in the book’s 128 pages is there a trace of tediousness or unwarranted repetition - the reader is held fast by a combination of elegant artwork, compelling composition, and an engaging story set in a continually surprising world.

The beauty and power of the story told lies in the universal range of experiences it draws upon so effortlessly: the unsettling pain of departing from the familiar, the bewildering nature of the unknown, be it an unfamiliar street, land, or people, and finally, the tentative steps with which we gradually claim a new place (and life) as our own. This range of feelings, though simple enough, form the delightful engine at the heart of this book.

…

Text by David Mathews
The New Indian Express, 24/01/09

The Library
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The Travelling Reader
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Sad-bot
from Mirjo #2