Cotton candy masquerading as a meal.
A former child prodigy fails to launch professionally but learns the importance of “heart knowledge,” all in the shadow of the almighty screwball genius god, Albert Einstein.
Ted Halker was the kind of 10-year-old who “just thought light made more…sense…as a semi-solid.” But as he skipped grade after grade in school, always landing at the top of his class, the brilliant child came to the sobering realization that there was “a chasm between knowledge…and knowing”—a point driven home in the high school locker room by an older classmate who loudly observed Ted’s “tiny little weiner.” Nevertheless, Ted persevered, embarking on a career in theoretical physics, marrying a beautiful woman and raising two lovely children, even if his daughter curses her genius for making her a social outcast and his son is a total horn dog (so Ted swears him to masturbation in exchange for a used car of his choice). The wife is great, though…except for her recurring headaches and irascible, senile father, who now lives with the family and torments Ted. But for as much promise as Ted once held, he’s in a long dry spell at work that could put his head on the chopping block. That is, until his father-in-law’s past as a bodyguard for Albert “Bert” Einstein—Ted’s guiding star—provides an opportunity to finally blow the world away. The family drama is winning enough, even with the occasional forays into snarky ham-handedness or oversexed juvenility, but the professional striving feels half-baked, and the reverence for Einstein seems played out. Kristiansen’s art is striking, with etched figures in a mist of smudges and shade, bringing to mind Bill Sienkiewicz by way of Moebius. Kristiansen expresses moments of intellectual rapture as full-page bursts of color and shape, some holding vibrant seismographic patterns. But this abstract beauty doesn’t quite tie into the rest of the tale, and Ted’s world seems too insular, the supporting characters too distant, so even a truly earth-shattering idea seems of little consequence.
Cotton candy masquerading as a meal.Pub Date: July 9, 2013
ISBN: 978-1-59643-263-5
Page Count: 128
Publisher: First Second
Review Posted Online: July 6, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2013
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
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.
Continuing his apparent mission to refract the whole of English culture and history through his personal lens, Ackroyd (Thames: The Biography, 2008, etc.) offers an all-prose rendering of Chaucer’s mixed-media masterpiece.
While Burton Raffel’s modern English version of The Canterbury Tales (2008) was unabridged, Ackroyd omits both “The Tale of Melibee” and “The Parson’s Tale” on the undoubtedly correct assumption that these “standard narratives of pious exposition” hold little interest for contemporary readers. Dialing down the piety, the author dials up the raunch, freely tossing about the F-bomb and Anglo-Saxon words for various body parts that Chaucer prudently described in Latin. Since “The Wife of Bath’s Tale” and “The Miller’s Tale,” for example, are both decidedly earthy in Middle English, the interpolated obscenities seem unnecessary as well as jarringly anachronistic. And it’s anyone’s guess why Ackroyd feels obliged redundantly to include the original titles (“Here bigynneth the Squieres Tales,” etc.) directly underneath the new ones (“The Squires Tale,” etc.); these one-line blasts of antique spelling and diction remind us what we’re missing without adding anything in the way of comprehension. The author’s other peculiar choice is to occasionally interject first-person comments by the narrator where none exist in the original, such as, “He asked me about myself then—where I had come from, where I had been—but I quickly turned the conversation to another course.” There seems to be no reason for these arbitrary elaborations, which muffle the impact of those rare times in the original when Chaucer directly addresses the reader. Such quibbles would perhaps be unfair if Ackroyd were retelling some obscure gem of Old English, but they loom larger with Chaucer because there are many modern versions of The Canterbury Tales. Raffel’s rendering captured a lot more of the poetry, while doing as good a job as Ackroyd with the vigorous prose.
A not-very-illuminating updating of Chaucer’s Tales.Pub Date: Nov. 16, 2009
ISBN: 978-0-670-02122-2
Page Count: 436
Publisher: Viking
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2009
PERSPECTIVES
© Copyright 2025 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.
