His main asset is his blood relation to a true innovator, a queer man married into wealth to a woman who near the end undergoes a personality change through violent means. One artistic choice Olivier Schrauwen makes that supports this reading is the anonymity of almost everyone's identity in the narrative through featureless faces until they become humanized by Arsene.Īdditionally, the book never attempts to portray Arsene as a man in control of anything, not even his bowels.
Here in Arsene Schrauwen I feel like the narrative works not as an endorsement of imperial projects, European occupation of the Congo in this case, but as a chronicle of how bumbling men accrue power through their kairotic presence. It's a struggle, and the reason I couldn't make it past the first few pages of Cloud Atlas despite numerous recs by friends. I've really been trying to rethink how to assess imperial narratives focused on imperialists without immediately writing it off as romancing genocide. It for my tastes is one of the best graphic novels ever, which is quite a claim considering the author is still a young man. Very beautiful artifact, this book production. It's a fascinating read, long and ambitious.
It reminds me in a way of the crazy magical films of Werner Herzog, only more surreal, less grounded in something like "the human spirit". Much of this is, for sure, including Oliver's presumptions about what his grandfather was thinking and saying. We have to make things up, we have to fictionalize, of course, though ALL of this tale may be fiction, as far as I know.
It is for me a commentary on the art of biography itself, the impossibility of knowing one's grandparents (or anyone) in any meaningful fashion at all, especially those who lived their lives a long time ago, whose stories come to us in fragments, reported by our parents and other relatives. Some colonialist excursion takes place in dreamlike fashion, a trip into a foreign land. It's beautifully and uniquely drawn and as a story sometimes ominous, sometimes funny, with a central focus on Arsene's obsession on his cousin's wife, which is kind of hilarious.
It can't be literally true, as much of it appears to take place as dream/fantasy or fantasies of various kinds. On the surface it would appear this pretty remarkable book is a biography of the author's grandfather.
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