THE INHERITANCE

An ambitious graphic memoir that combines text, drawings, and photos into a meditation on what divides and unites us.

Throughout this impressively audacious book, Povinelli, Franz Boas Professor of Anthropology at Columbia, effectively conveys her attempts to come to terms with her fraught familial roots in an Italian Alpine village, a map of which was displayed in the family’s living room. When she asked about it as a child, she was told to leave it alone, or “you’ll start a huge fight over a pointless problem.” Part of the problem was that the village had two names: Karezol as part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and Carisolo when it became part of Italy. This division would become symbolic of so many rifts that became parts of the author’s inheritance, including disconnections among generations in the household, between parents and children, and the disharmony caused by a grandmother tragically losing her memory. Furthermore, the gender divisions among her siblings resulted in varying levels of responsibilities and expectations. Povinelli’s family settled in Buffalo, New York, but their move to Shreveport, Louisiana, when the author was a toddler exposed yet more divisions. Eventually, she realized that her familial experiences were “problems inserted into a national trouble with a broad American grammar.” The text is incisive and refreshingly concise, but Povinelli’s art is what truly shines: Her drawings are evocatively eloquent, particularly as she chronicles her struggles with “visual panic attacks” caused by living in “a haunted house whose walls had long ago fallen in on themselves.” Expanding her personal story outward, the author speaks to experiences that will resonate with anyone struggling with familial legacies. “Even if I could have found all the dispersed pieces of our shattered inheritance, they would no longer have fit together,” she writes. “The compressions of memory had fundamentally deformed the fragments and lodged foreign material into their heart."

An inspired use of the graphic format to weave a narrative with a power beyond words alone.