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
What happens to hippies who sell out 20 years down the pike? They become the subject of books like this witty debut about aging boomers’ gradual accommodation to reality. Janelle and Tom may not have been the original flower children, but they were certainly on the scene. Married in the late 1960s, both were involved in various antiwar and liberation movements, and for a few weeks they even sheltered two members of a Weathermen-like underground on the lam for killing a Boston cop during a bank robbery. Later on, they wandered across the country, and Tom, while working at a university, eventually learned to program computers. When Janelle gave birth to their son Zak, Tom built a cabin for them in Valdosta, Georgia, where he found work as a computer designer. Life is going along happily for the pair when they are confronted with a ghost from their past in the person of Michael “Angel” Martelli. An old friend from movement days, Angel calls out of the blue asking if he can drop by for a chat; he’s now a lawyer, and it turns out that he’s concerned about Katherine Powers, one of the bank robbers Tom and Janelle sheltered 30 years back. Katherine has decided to turn herself in, and Angel (who arranged for her to stay with Tom and Janelle) is afraid that his name might come up in the case and hurt his career. Janelle promises to say nothing, but inwardly she begins to wonder about the value of all they once believed in. She’s also increasingly distraught over Zak’s imminent departure for college. Has she lost her ideals? Or has she simply put those ideals into private life? Perhaps “the personal is political,” as they used to say, though in a way that Janelle could not have guessed until now. Somewhat rambling and obvious, but told with a fresh voice and infused with a likable spirit: even Young Republicans might be taken in.
Pub Date: May 1, 1999
ISBN: 0-9657639-3-5
Page Count: 230
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 1, 1999
In his first fiction in nearly 30 years, Cabot (The Joshua Tree, 1970) offers an exemplary trio of novellas, each occupied with the theme of reconciliation to oneself and one’s losses, presented in often stunning prose. Each tale is told from multiple perspectives——generally, those of several male members of a single family’spanning decades and, in the first novella, —Breath of the Earth,— centuries. —Breath— chronicles a Mediterranean village’s fortunes, conflicts, and sufferings. Cabot’s rendering of places, though they are often too stylized to reveal their real-world basis, is marvelous: The olive trees, parched dirt, and wine, however underspecified (is that Mediterranean land really Italy?), become hypnotically real as a history of fierce pirates, wayward sons, and, the most powerful of all malefactors, modernization, unfolds. Cabot’s scale and tone are intimate and sometimes impressionistic, but the pleasure of the volume is less in what happens—often events that are hard to place or even identify—than in the way the tales are told. Cabot’s mode throughout is elegiac: His narrators are woeful though not bitter. In —A Rat in the Boardroom,— a son learns and finally leads the business his father established. By selecting discontinuous scenes from different stages of each man’s life, Cabot persuasively depicts the son’s inability to comprehend his father’s view of the world—and the ways each man’s values corrode the other’s idea of what makes life worthwhile—as intractable. The final tale, —Touch of Dust,— completes the progression from village through family with its story of the solitary artist who attempts to wrestle his past into meaning and who emerges with an inspiring conviction about the love he has known. For all its extraordinary lack of specificity, Cabot’s incantatory prose memorably captures the dramatic tragedy of living, and the precious, endangered whimper of redemption.
Pub Date: Oct. 29, 1999
ISBN: 0-929701-60-7
Page Count: 264
Publisher: N/A
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 1, 1999
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