![]() At the end, we see Arsène bicycle into the darkness, no more a solid character than he was at the outset.īesides his playfulness with the absurdity of the story, Oliver Schrauwen is also playful with the layout and drawings of his comic. Still, a decisive climax is avoided and all the grandiloquence of the project the colonialists undertake is undercut by the needs of capitalism. A character is committed and receives electro-shock therapy. It’s an anti-story the way that Tristram Shandy is. This is not the story of a hero, nor does it seem to be a critique of colonialism. ![]() So we get a story of the artist’s grandfather, a man-child who moves to a colony- a place that is never named, inhabited by a people we don’t get to see until late in the book- and who spends most of the “adventure” hiding in his bungalow, too afraid to venture out. I make these comparisons to Katchor and Sterne so you understand that this is a book aimed at a particular sensibility, at a reader who enjoys the absurd and the structurally inventive. The book also reminds me of Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy, in the sense that expectation is often thwarted and any sense of narrative tension is drained by the inanity and passivity of the main character. ![]() Arsène Schrauwen reminds me a bit of the work of Ben Katchor, with his blocky businessmen engaged in endeavors that seem just outside the real. ![]()
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