An achievement kindred to R. Crumb’s Genesis (2009), though less literal and more compressed.
In his first graphic novel, one classic artist channels another.
With all due respect to Dante, this is Chwast’s Divine Comedy, one that uses the poet’s masterwork as a launching pad for a flight to the creative heavens. An influential, revolutionary illustrator, Chwast (Seymour: The Obsessive Images of Seymour Chwast, 2009, etc.) meets his match in one of the cornerstones of Western literature. Distilling Dante’s three volumes into little more than 100 pages of large panels (many of them page-sized), he adheres to the tri-partite structure of the original without overburdening the spirit with reverence. Chwast’s Dante has a jaunty fedora and a pipe clenched between his teeth; his Virgil is a bespectacled Brit with a bowler; his Beatrice has the beauty of a classic Hollywood glamour girl. Thus, just as Dante wrote in the Italian vernacular of his day at a time when Latin was the language of philosophy and religion, Chwast has recast the work in today’s vernacular of graphic narrative, sacrificing the literary poetry of the original for visual imagery that is thoroughly accessible. From the boiling river of blood and the rain of excrement in the circles of hell through the ascent into heaven’s ineffable beauty (as with Dante, the transitional stage of purgatory is less compelling than the extremes), the artist makes the Divine Comedy irresistibly comic and inspirationally transcendent.
An achievement kindred to R. Crumb’s Genesis (2009), though less literal and more compressed.Pub Date: Sept. 1, 2010
ISBN: 978-1-60819-084-3
Page Count: 128
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: June 14, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 2010
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
Newcomer Kerr shows off his considerable talents to good effect here, though the story isn’t much more than a rehash of The...
A junior Irish terrorist is sent on a peace-promoting exchange trip to Milwaukee. It’s not a good idea.
Wil Carson is a nasty little thing, but he's the narrator, so you've got to learn to live with his eccentricities. These include a love for weapons of all kinds, a marked lack of squeamishness around violence, and a rabid hatred of all things Catholic. At age 14, Wil is already an up-and-coming member of Ulster Freedom Fighters, a Protestant terrorist group in Belfast. He’s chosen to take part in an exchange program that sends disadvantaged Protestant and Catholic kids to live with families in the American Midwest, in the hope of fostering togetherness and understanding. This ideal starts to go to pot right away on the plane over, when Wil gets into it with a couple of “Taigs” (Catholic boys). Seething resentment smolders in his cynical breast even after he arrives in the comparatively bucolic suburbs of Milwaukee. There, in the home of a distant and somewhat frightening preacher, his dotty wife, and their teenaged son Derry, Wil is allowed to soak himself in the lazy luxuries of 1980s American suburbia. Unable to keep the lid on his Taig-hating ways, however, he soon indoctrinates rage-prone Derry with his views. It doesn't take more than a couple run-ins with other Ulster lads for the usual bored teenage high-jinks to turn extremely ugly. The Belfast-born author, who came to Milwaukee himself in a real-life exchange program, convincingly models the story on his own experiences. There's a potent frisson between the silky cadences of Wil's criminal blarney and the dull-witted characters who surround him. But even with the story’s abundance of dark wit, the violent climax is much too predictable.
Newcomer Kerr shows off his considerable talents to good effect here, though the story isn’t much more than a rehash of The Butcher Boy mixed with a little Clockwork Orange.Pub Date: June 6, 2002
ISBN: 0-7868-6798-1
Page Count: 304
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: April 15, 2002
Part freak show, part corporate satire, part the successful study of a family in crisis—from a distinctive literary voice...
The perils of factory egg-farming are on gothic display in Levandoski’s third (after Serendipity Green, 2000) as an Ohio man goes to transgressive lengths to save his fourth-generation family farm.
Calvin Cassowary is only 24 when his father dies and responsibility for the farm falls to him, but he’s young, in love with brown-eyed Jeanie, and uncowed by the prospect of a quarter-million-dollar debt, the cost of getting a new 60,000-hen operation up and running. When daughter Rhea is born, prospects look only brighter. But five years and another 150,000 chickens tell a different story: Jeanie dies of cancer, and Rhea is starting to show an affinity for the downtrodden poultry masses in the laying barns. At the urging of his corporate parent, Gallinipper Foods, Calvin continues to expand, but Rhea’s repressed horror at the brutality of factory egg production manifests itself unmistakably—she starts growing feathers. Hiding them from her father and her allergy-ridden new stepmother is easy enough until she reaches puberty and the occasion of her first training bra exposes her secret. Many specialists and a shrink (the effervescent Dr. Pirooz Aram, from Levandoski’s previous novel) later, Rhea is fully feathered and fully secluded, an embarrassment to her parents. Calvin, with a million hens, teeters on the brink of bankruptcy when America’s appetite for eggs decreases. Then a lawsuit comes from a neighboring subdivision that’s offended by the smell of poultry. Desperate for cash, Calvin starts dragging Rhea to county fairs as “Rhea the Feather Girl” but soon finds himself facing child-abuse charges and national headlines. When Gallinipper steps in to spin it all as a publicity stunt, Rhea takes matters into her own hands, vanishing in order to find the only cure for her condition.
Part freak show, part corporate satire, part the successful study of a family in crisis—from a distinctive literary voice deserving to be more widely known.Pub Date: July 1, 2002
ISBN: 1-57962-048-5
Page Count: 279
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 15, 2002
BOOK REVIEW
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