EDWARD GAUVIN

RevN4 says:

This is book that begs multiple read-throughs. This is a piece of literature that needs to be discussed among friends. Peeters’ script and artwork communicates a dream-like state that simultaneously doesn’t and does make perfect sense. He has captured a dream in the form of a comic…

Readers who enjoy both literature and comics in the spirit of City of Glass and Ghost World will find much to enjoy in Pachyderme.

At The Comixverse, Zedric Dimalanta calls the Sergio Toppi’s work “absolutely astounding” in Sharaz-De: Tales from the Arabian Nights, published in 2012 by Archaia:

A rare English translation of a seminal work by one of Europe’s most influential artists.

Features absolutely gorgeous line art and radical storytelling techniques that any serious student of comics and sequential art with the means should view and study.

Classic tales are allowed to retain their simple charm.

Informative, entertaining foreword by Walt Simonson is almost a brief art lesson on its own.

Jérémie Dres, a French comics creator of Jewish Polish descent, recently gave an event about his graphic novel We Won’t See Auschwitz, published last year by SelfMadeHero. Late Night Library features an interview with the creator (scroll down):

Stephanie Trott at Cleaver Magazine (where Brazos Price also reviewed Frederik Peeters’ Pachyderme from the same publisher) says:

The reader is dropped immediately into the action, rendezvousing with Dres in Warsaw’s historic Old Town as he searches for his grandmother’s original home on an unseasonably warm June afternoon. Together we search with him through the clouded eyes of the past for the buildings and neighborhoods his grandmother once recalled perfectly from memory, only to find that they either no longer exist or have been altered beyond recognition. Dres, eager to learn from those currently dwelling within the city walls, next meets two “young, Jewish, Polish, and hip” Varsovians who advise and answer his questions about the current sentiments of Poland toward Jews. He is amazed to find that there are still Jews in Poland, his own family having long since departed for France. Dres continues to meet both older and younger Polish residents, conducting a series of informational interviews and receiving in return detailed contemporary history lessons. The week becomes one where movement is somewhat determined by conversation, the destinations lingering on the horizon like doors begging to be opened. We tumble into this rabbit-hole expedition like Alice through the looking glass, as the present becomes a vehicle for gaining access to the past.

At Library Journal, Ingrid Bohnenkamp of Missouri’s Springfield-Greene County Library District says:

By not seeing Auschwitz, Dres discovers family secrets and an understanding of where he came from, but, more important, he discovers the vibrant Jewish identity that existed before and during the Nazi occupation and that continues in modern-day Poland.

 

Verdict: For readers who think a serious story can’t be told with pictures, Dres offers a wonderful introduction to the graphic novel. Recommended for graphic novels fans who want to read more nonfiction.

And finally Publishers Weekly weighs in:

The book, an English translation of Dres’s Italian graphic novel of the same name, details the author’s journey to Poland with his brother, Martin, to trace their Jewish roots after the death of their grandmother. Told in a clean journalistic style that prizes accuracy over adventure… The book gets off to a promising start, describing the humorous and touching relationship between Dres and his grandmother. It then delves meticulously into the brothers’ journey to Poland and the surprises they find there regarding their Jewish heritage. As the title suggests, the brothers choose not to visit Auschwitz and instead focus on the current state of Jews and Judaism in modern-day Poland. It’s a smart decision to avoid this already-well-trodden territory… Simple, pared-down b&w visuals are a good match for the subject matter, and the more active and emotionally resonant scenes, like the one describing the discovery of the grave sites of the brothers’ ancestors.

Cover design by David Mazzuchelli

At UK site Comics Review, Win Wiacek has this to say about Blutch’s So Long, Silver Screen, out last year from Brooklyn-based PictureBox:

This lyrical, declamatory, harshly imaginative and lyrically introspective collection of short tales – as much stern self-analysis as autobiographical exploration – by pre-eminent cartoonist and illustrator Blutch examines the creator’s relationship to and lifelong shaping by the magic of celluloid fantasies and the mythical icons who made and populated them.

Challenging, enticing and genuinely thought-provoking, this delicious cartoon voyage with a keenly enquiring companion – who has all of the questions but so few answers – is a sheer joy that no grown-up fan of graphic narratives and motion pictures can afford to miss.

Sadly, PictureBox shut its doors at the end of last year. It was a fine publisher of beautiful books, and will be missed.

I will be on the following panels this Friday morning, 2/28, at the Associated Writing Programs 2014 Conference in Seattle, WA:

• The Influence of the International: Four Writers Talk, panel hosted by Susan Harris of Words Without Borders, 9AM (Rm  302), with Forrest Gander and Willis Barnstone
• Translation in the University: Where Does It Fit?, panel hosted by Amalia Gladhart, 12PM (Cedar Room), with Karen McPherson, Karen Emmerich, and Michelle Kyoko-Crowson

See you there!

Cover art by Marcela Bolivar

Exotic Gothic 5, edited by Danel Olson, which came out last year from PS Publishing, recently made Locus Magazine’s Recommended Reading List. It contains Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud’s story “The Open Mirror,” which Mario Guslandi at SF Site called

“a delightful supernatural tale with a spicy touch of eroticism first published in French and here translated into English by Edward Gauvin.”

UK Cover

Châteaureynaud’s “The Gulf of the Years,” which originally appeared in the 2010 Small Beer collection A Life on Paper, was reprinted in Ann & Jeff VanderMeer’s colossal anthology, The Time Traveler’s Almanac.

This post is unpremeditated. Had I planned it, I’d probably have been able to supply better reasons, or more thoroughgoing argumentation, or even anticipate objections to my reasons, and shut those down.

I was going to post about my latest blog piece there, “Tintin in the Land of Foreign Affairs,” about the experience of working on Weapons of Mass Diplomacy by Abel Lanzac and Christophe Blain, a graphic novel forthcoming from UK indie stalwart SelfMadeHero this May. But instead, I found myself feeling very grateful for my long, fruitful working relationship with Words Without Borders, and listing my purely personal, sometimes honorable, occasionally venal reasons for loving it.

It was the first.

It is truly global in scope.

It does comics every year.

It does an LGBT issue every year.

It sees to the permissions process for translators.

It pays for those rights.

It pays translators.

Just sayin’, is all.

13 years of bringing you world literature, going on 14! Consider giving today.

H.V. Chao’s “The Scene” is among the twelve selections in The Red Line’s Best of 2013 anthology. In the preface editor Stephen Lynch says:

One of the things that always draws us to a story is a strong voice and tangible sense of place. Both of these were evident in two selections from the Excess issue: Rush by Bear Weiter and H. V. Chao’s The Scene. We loved the rich atmosphere in both stories and how a sense of desperation and hyper-activity threatens to overwhelm the central characters.

From Jared Gardner at Guttergeek:

Peeters is a reminder of something I talk about at some length in a recent piece at Public Books: the fact that living, as we do, in a relatively golden age of Franco-Belgian comics in translation serves only to remind us how much amazing work still remains inaccessible to English readers. Aside from the translation of Peeters’ 2001 book and his collaborative work with Pierre Wazem on Koma, we have little sense of the Swiss cartoonist’s career on this side of the Atlantic (and Koma, a dizzying and moving dystopian fantasy, received shockingly little attention when Humanoids published an English edition in 2012). Fortunately, SelfMade Hero is going to change all that, having picked up the English-language rights to his celebrated sci-fi series Aama, already out in the UK and making its way to these shores in the spring.

In the meantime, however, there is more than enough to bring stateside readers up to speed with the range and talent of this cartoonist, whose Blue Pills, engaging as it was, now looks a bit like juvenilia in comparison…

The book is a testament to the power of graphic storytelling. But it is also a declaration of an artist who has arrived at the height of his powers and is, like his protagonist, ready to show of the full strength of his artistry.

Henry Chamberlain at Comics Grinder:

An elegant young woman struggles her way out of a horrific accident and finds herself in a strange world. Thus begins the new graphic novel by Frederik Peeters, “Pachyderme,” published by SelfMadeHero. Peeters borrows from David Lynch’s dreamlike narrative style, specifically his landmark film, “Mulholland Drive,” and creates something wholly original and worthy of comparison. It’s not your typical reference. It’s more of a tapping into a similar wavelength or molding from the same clay…

If you gave one hundred cartoonists the assignment of somehow riffing on David Lynch and going on to create their own mesmerizing work, you would get a lot of interesting results, no doubt. Let “Pachyderme” lead the way. This 88-page full color graphic novel is a keeper you’ll enjoy with every new read…

Drawn in a very confident and fluid style, the artwork of Frederik Peeters is a joy to behold. He is truly a remarkable artist/writer.

My translation of Sylvain Jouty’s “The Wall” is now out in the latest issue of the climbing magazine Alpinist, Winter 2014 (available in hard copy or online to subscribers only). It’s the first piece in the Climbing Life section. I’m really happy to have found a home for this non-traditional story in a non-traditional venue, where I hope the austere ethos it derives from its vision of the world as a vertical rockface will be welcomed by readers who are themselves mountain enthusiasts. Jouty wears his literary influences (the usual suspects: Borges, Calvino) lightly, melding these with his own experience as a climber. Here’s an excerpt:

The Wall: this is what we call the world.

Our scholars and priests have given us (sometimes contradictory) reasons for the Earth’s verticality, but for us, it has the force of plain fact. From birth, from the first day our mothers carry us on their backs, until the day when we have no more strength to hang on to the holds—as with me, today—our entire existence unfolds above a never-ending void. Once we’ve accepted its sting and its temptation, the Wall provides for all our needs. It feeds, waters, shelters and even cheers us. And we’d hardly have any reasons to complain if it weren’t for the vertical horizon that both attracts and repels. Yes, the void is indeed the crucial question of our lives, the great riddle our scholars debate, the moral axis of our existence, which we attempt, no doubt vainly, to escape with an ascent that we wish to believe just as infinite…. The void saw us born; it watches us climb, live and die; it will greet us with indifference on the day we die and serve as our only grave; it alone likely knows the final meaning and ultimate goal of our quest. It’s no wonder that some hope, by willingly letting it swallow them, to find a revelation that life refuses to give.

Born in 1949, Sylvain Jouty is the author of five novels and a biography of Hungarian Tibetologist Sándor Kőrösi Csoma. An avid mountaineer, he has published more than a dozen books on mountains and climbing, including several reference works, and for fifteen years, he served as the editor-in-chief of the magazine Alpinisme et Randonée. His three books of short fiction have won several awards, including the Prix Renaissance and the Grand Prix de la Société des gens de lettres. He is a member of the contemporary French fabulist movement La Nouvelle Fiction. His work has been translated into Russian, Spanish, Italian, and German.