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"Graphic Novel About a Mid-Life Crisis"
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Graphic Novel About a Mid-Life Crisis
-
Nov 23, 2011
- by tomtom13
- posted in Love of Comics & Graphic Novels!
Rating:
ASTERIOS POLYP, the title character of this graphic novel, is a famed architect, author, and professor, but when we first meet him at the beginning of the book he's living alone in a small apartment that catches on fire by a strike of lightning. In a series of flashbacks scattered throughout the book until the past meets the present-a present that finds Asterios working as a mechanic in a small town called Apogee-we learn about Asterios's early life, how he became so successful, how he met his wife, his struggles, and why he and his wife separated. Asterios is having a mid-life crisis and he needs to find peace not only with the man he was, but the man he has become.
+1
Though a work of fiction, ASTERIOS POLYP is a real-world based graphic novel. Other than a few instances here and there (are they simply chance or is a higher power at work), the book resembles the life of a person living in our world. Many of the things that Asterios experiences are things that many middle-aged American men can probably relate to.
With that said, I didn't find anything extraordinary in ASTERIOS POLYP. There some interesting word games that go one with the names of the characters and places, but beyond that Asterios isn't a character I was able to relate to very well because he is so aloof and out of touch for much of the novel. I was pretty much apathetic about Asterios's plight for much of the novel. Overall, though ASTERIOS POLYP isn't a terrible graphic novel, it's not very compelling either.
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tomtom13
Ranked #3
Ranked #3
I like to read and watch movies.
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About this book
Starred Review. For decades, Mazzucchelli has been a master without a masterpiece. Now he has one. His long-awaited graphic novel is a huge, knotty marvel, the comics equivalent of a Pynchon or Gaddis novel, and radically different from anything he's done before. Asterios Polyp, its arrogant, prickly protagonist, is an award-winning architect who's never built an actual building, and a pedant in the midst of a spiritual crisis. After the structure of his own life falls apart, he runs away to try to rebuild it into something new. There are fascinating digressions on aesthetic philosophy, as well as some very broad satire, but the core of the book is Mazzucchelli's odyssey of style—every major character in the book is associated with a specific drawing style and visual motifs, and the design, color scheme and formal techniques of every page change to reinforce whatever's happening in the story. Although Mazzucchelli stacks the deck—few characters besides Polyp and his inamorata, the impossibly good-hearted sculptor Hana, are more than caricatures—the book's bravado and mastery make it riveting even when it's frustrating, and provide a powerful example of how comics use visual information to illustrate complex, interconnected topics. Easily one of the best books of 2009 already.(June)
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
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