It all feels like a book Ikezawa felt obliged to write. Plodding and undistinguished.
The ordeal of a young Japanese artist framed for selling drugs in Indonesia is the subject of this melodramatic prizewinning novel by the author of Still Lives (1987).
The tale is narrated in alternating chapters by Tetsuro (“Tez”) Nishijima, an itinerant painter long estranged from his family, and by his younger sister Kaoru, a “coordinator-interpreter” who works for a Parisian documentary film company. The story charts Kaoru’s education in reality as she navigates the intricacies of legal procedure and cultural contrast in Bali (where Tez has been imprisoned), while detailing through flashbacks Tez’s travels and misadventures throughout Southeast Asia, particularly his contrasting relationships with an amorous Vietnamese woman and free-spirited Scandinavian culture vulture Inge, “a witch sent from Europe to lure me away from my path as an artist” by hooking him on heroin (he is in fact guilty of drug possession, though innocent of criminal facilitation). There’s almost a lot going on in this earnest novel, including the shedding of most of Kaoru’s illusions, a discursive piecemeal history of Japanese-Indonesian relations, a briefly suggested parallel between Tez’s “story” and a tale from the classical Indian epic Mahabharata, and a surfeit of climactic plot twists. But little of this is developed. Nor are the possibilities of the suggestive title (denoting a prizewinning painting of Tez’s for which Kaoru had posed) explored in any depth. Ikezawa dutifully records the physical symptoms and emotional fallout of heroin addiction, but Tez’s aesthetic sensibility is declared rather than rendered, and his reality as a character is undercut by Ikezawa’s stagy use of second-person narration in which Tez directly addresses himself, and overreliance on emotionally charged rhetorical questions (e.g., “Everything’s designed to lead you to heroin—why leave the embrace?”).
It all feels like a book Ikezawa felt obliged to write. Plodding and undistinguished.Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2001
ISBN: 4-7700-2686-2
Page Count: 280
Publisher: Kodansha
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2001
BOOK REVIEW
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
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
© Copyright 2024 Kirkus Media LLC. All Rights Reserved.
Follow
Popular in this Genre
We can’t wait for you to join Kirkus!
It’s free and takes less than 10 seconds!
Already have an account? Log in.
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
Welcome Back!
OR
Sign in with GoogleTrouble signing in? Retrieve credentials.
bookshelf
