Inviting enough to make readers seek out the novel—which means Heuet has done his job.
This comic-book version of Proust’s masterpiece caused quite a stir when it first appeared in France, but the hoopla is undeserved. Heuet’s adaptation is neither a disgrace nor a work of genius; it’s simply a respectable (and respectful) graphic narrative much in the vein of the old Classics Illustrated titles: heavy on text and somewhat generically drawn. This slim book adapts only the first two sections of Swann’s Way, the “overture” and “Combray”; a dozen or so more volumes are promised. The artist and his American publisher have made some odd choices. With so many fine English translations to chose from, NBM instead commissioned a new one from Joe Johnson, who begins by ignoring the now more accepted (and more accurate) overall title, In Search of Lost Time. This is especially odd because the translation is in general quite literal. The artist’s main error is more serious: he chooses a visual style totally unsuited to his characters and their creator’s prose. Everyone here has little dot eyes and dash mouths, a visual homage to Herge’s Tintin that makes no sense, shatters our feel for the period, and cheapens the intensity of Proust’s internalized narrative. Nonetheless, Heuet’s version succeeds quite well as a beginner’s guide to Proust: we get the famous magic lantern of the narrator’s spoiled childhood, the equally famous madeleine, and an introduction to the two “ways” of Combray. Heuet captures Proust’s strong sense of social order and also his delight in the eccentricities of those around him, from his hypochondriacal aunt to the unsuitably married Swann. Some of the landscapes are kitschy, but the city scenes are well studied. The only real visual challenge here is distinguishing among the characters.
Inviting enough to make readers seek out the novel—which means Heuet has done his job.Pub Date: June 1, 2001
ISBN: 1-56163-278-3
Page Count: 72
Publisher: NBM
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 2001
A slim novel, both in its emotion and construction, set in 1972, centering on a family coming to grips with the death of a son and the closing of their small town’s factory. The Vietnam War is gradually ending and Watergate is heating up, but these two giant events in US history serve only as backdrop to the personal anguish of the MacLeans. When 18-year-old Cory dies in a summer-job mining accident, the family unravels at the loss of their golden boy—blatantly the favorite son, popular, good, and college bound. Cory’s death leaves a hole in the family that older brother Mike and younger brother Stephan feel compelled, yet unable, to fill. The black sheep of the family, Mike drifts from one low-paying job to the next; after work, he spends his time barroom brawling, or fighting with his bitter father. Stephan, still in school, wants to be a musician, although now, with Cory’s passing, he feels the pressure to take the straight and narrow to college, to live out the life that Cory lost. Add to this the disenchantment of parents Bud and Lola, laid off when the bottle factory closed down, and the tale provides fertile ground for examining the failure of the American Dream. This slow-moving effort, however, just scratches the surface, shifting from one landscape-focused event to another, rarely exploring the emotional terror that lurks within each character. Nieman offers some gemlike observations—the desperation of the town slut, holiday shopping at the local department store, Bud’s frustration at being retrained in computers—but she can—t quite sustain a storyline that refuses to progress. The bleak ending, derived from a lack of resolution, is in a sense admirable, and true to the resignation the characters hold for the future; it also reinforces, though, the lack of movement that defines the rest of the narrative. A potentially powerful work that fails itself through lack of focus.
Pub Date: Feb. 1, 2000
ISBN: 0-9657639-6-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 15, 1999
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
A daringly placid novel about—here goes—a quiet, reflective serial killer. Leaving his first 13 victims behind in Oregon graves, Vann Siegert drives his pickup east, ending up in a small Massachusetts town where he rents a room with the Deans—postal worker Doug, his wife Jane, and their daughter Karen—takes a temporary job with the post office, drifts into an apathetic affair with his co-worker Ferrin, and resumes his affectless avocation, offering his bottle of Southern Comfort laced with poison to acquaintances, hitchhikers, stranded motorists, and the homeless. McCreary (Mount's Mistake, 1987) clearly knows that the success of Siegert's deadpan first-person narrative, with its ritual avoidance of suspense or even logical causality, depends on the storyteller's self-portrait, and though his principal revelatory devices—flashbacks showing Siegert's matter-of- fact abuse by his mother and his doubling with his dead brother Neil, moments of unfulfilled passion counterbalanced by understated homicides (Siegert is incapable of closeness to anyone but his victims and his dead), and, eventually, the arrest of Doug for Jane's murder after the police have picked up Siegert's own trail—press too schematically toward a rationale of Siegert's divided nature, the narrator-killer successfully resists his author's attempts to explain him away. Disturbingly effective in evoking the hypernormal killer. But don't expect the usual pleasures of the genre.
Pub Date: Sept. 1, 1991
ISBN: 0-670-83414-9
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1991
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