Book-It 'o13! Book #7
The Fifty Books Challenge, year four! (Years one, two, three, and four just in case you're curious.) This was a library request.
Title: A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return by Zeina Abirached
Details: Copyright 2012, Graphic Universe
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "When Zeina was born, the civil war in Lebanon had been going on for six years, so it's just a normal part of life for her and her parents and little brother. The city of Beirut is cut in two, separated by bricks and sandbags and threatened by snipers and shelling. East Beirut is for Christians, and West Beirut is for Muslims. When Zeina's parents don't return one afternoon from a visit to the other half of the city and the bombing grows ever closer, the neighbors in her apartment house create a world indoors for Zeina and her brother where it's comfy and safe, where they can share cooking lessons and games and gossip. Together they try to make it through a dramatic day in the one place they hoped they would always be safe- home.
Zeina Abirached, born into a Lebanese Christian family in 1981, has collected her childhood memories of Beirut in a warm story about the strength of family and community."
Why I Wanted to Read It: This received positive attention from the AV Club Comics Panel.
How I Liked It: I enjoyed Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi to the point where anything else she's done seems somehow lesser. I think the series is easily a masterpiece of the genre, with Satrapi's characters and line work as distinctive as a fingerprint.
So when I heard about another memoirist who was inviting comparisons to Satrapi (a childhood story of wartime in pen and ink style), I was both skeptical and intrigued. Another who I'd heard claimed similarities to Satrapi fell woefully short. Happily, that is not the case here.
Author Zeina Abirached is so staggeringly accomplished it's kind of a wonder to have never heard of her work before now (and hopefully this book, first published in France in 2007, will secure her American following). Her first graphic novel Beyrouth-Catharsis scored the top place at the International Comic Book Festival in Beirut when Abirached was only twenty-one. By twenty-five, she'd published two more graphic novels, this time in French, and by twenty-six her animated short scored a nomination during the 5th Tehran International Animation festival.
Although this book is but a small fraction, both in page and time period, of Persepolis, it packs no less heart nor art, and Abirached has an excellent way with her characters, making them as familiar as family in a few panels. While Persepolis could occasionally veer off into the choppy, A Game For Swallows is all polish and curve. Abirached's use of texture per each character is almost fascinating, the more mundane the character. Handyman Churci, depicted as hairy and attired in a simple undershirt, has precise markings like sprinkles on his arms. The children's hair, mussed by play, spirals loops and half-loops around their faces.
The translation is smoother than Persepolis's, due in some part to the length and the relatively staid setting.
The book's ending is abrupt, but not without poignancy.
A Game For Swallows doesn't take Persepolis's place, it deserves the spot on the shelf next to it.
Notable: The wonderful Trina Robbins offers a foreward.
Title: A Game for Swallows: To Die, to Leave, to Return by Zeina Abirached
Details: Copyright 2012, Graphic Universe
Synopsis (By Way of Front Flap): "When Zeina was born, the civil war in Lebanon had been going on for six years, so it's just a normal part of life for her and her parents and little brother. The city of Beirut is cut in two, separated by bricks and sandbags and threatened by snipers and shelling. East Beirut is for Christians, and West Beirut is for Muslims. When Zeina's parents don't return one afternoon from a visit to the other half of the city and the bombing grows ever closer, the neighbors in her apartment house create a world indoors for Zeina and her brother where it's comfy and safe, where they can share cooking lessons and games and gossip. Together they try to make it through a dramatic day in the one place they hoped they would always be safe- home.
Zeina Abirached, born into a Lebanese Christian family in 1981, has collected her childhood memories of Beirut in a warm story about the strength of family and community."
Why I Wanted to Read It: This received positive attention from the AV Club Comics Panel.
How I Liked It: I enjoyed Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi to the point where anything else she's done seems somehow lesser. I think the series is easily a masterpiece of the genre, with Satrapi's characters and line work as distinctive as a fingerprint.
So when I heard about another memoirist who was inviting comparisons to Satrapi (a childhood story of wartime in pen and ink style), I was both skeptical and intrigued. Another who I'd heard claimed similarities to Satrapi fell woefully short. Happily, that is not the case here.
Author Zeina Abirached is so staggeringly accomplished it's kind of a wonder to have never heard of her work before now (and hopefully this book, first published in France in 2007, will secure her American following). Her first graphic novel Beyrouth-Catharsis scored the top place at the International Comic Book Festival in Beirut when Abirached was only twenty-one. By twenty-five, she'd published two more graphic novels, this time in French, and by twenty-six her animated short scored a nomination during the 5th Tehran International Animation festival.
Although this book is but a small fraction, both in page and time period, of Persepolis, it packs no less heart nor art, and Abirached has an excellent way with her characters, making them as familiar as family in a few panels. While Persepolis could occasionally veer off into the choppy, A Game For Swallows is all polish and curve. Abirached's use of texture per each character is almost fascinating, the more mundane the character. Handyman Churci, depicted as hairy and attired in a simple undershirt, has precise markings like sprinkles on his arms. The children's hair, mussed by play, spirals loops and half-loops around their faces.
The translation is smoother than Persepolis's, due in some part to the length and the relatively staid setting.
The book's ending is abrupt, but not without poignancy.
A Game For Swallows doesn't take Persepolis's place, it deserves the spot on the shelf next to it.
Notable: The wonderful Trina Robbins offers a foreward.