Reading updates.

God help me, but I'm addicted to lists. So when I saw a goodreads friend had a shelf of 'Guardian 1000' top novels, I had to know what it was. So far I've been able to resist the temptation to make my own shelf at goodreads to keep track of it, but I did download the list from the Guardian website and import it into a spreadsheet. The list doesn't quite ping my O/C tracking instinct enough, though, because among the books I noticed a misspelled author's name, an entry for the 'book' "The Chronicles of Narnia," and even worse, an entry for the 'book' by Terry Pratchett "The Discworld Series."

Guardian, please.

If your compartmentalization is that sloppy, you don't deserve my O/C efforts. You gotta give if you wanna get back.

Anyway, the list reminded me that I read this book, and loved it, and what the heck, I'll say it's a novel. Chris Ware's Jimmy Corrigan comics in an alternate Chicago paper actually inspired me to create a webcomic for a while. So I guess it's fair to say Jimmy Corrigan affected me quite a bit.

Without getting overly analytical, and losing the forest for the trees, I want to point out that having Jimmy Corrigan be the only character to have facial features was profoundly effective. This book captures that feeling of modern disconnection from other humans like no other book I've ever read. It's a beautiful sad feeling.

(5++ stars)
This book lives up to its billing as the best graphic novel ever to be published. I can’t believe I haven’t come across it until now (it was published in 2003), but the wait allowed time for the book to be published in paperback, which I much prefer to hardback. It’s a brick of a work (380 pages) with an incredible amount of drawings on each page. The style of drawing is relatively simplistic, but what Chris Ware manages to communicate through his simple art is incredible. I found myself in awe of what he managed to “say” through a series of pictures that only differ slightly from one another. A gusty night…snow slowly piling up on a telegraph line…brilliant.

The story of Jimmy Corrigan is a sad one. I don’t think I saw Jimmy smile once. But he has had little to smile about in his life, having lived with an abusive, and then absent, father. As an adult, Jimmy receives a letter from his father, requesting a meeting and this is the point where the book takes off. Most of the book is flash-backs to his lonely childhood and the treatment he received from his father and other children.

Any fan of graphic novels, or anyone who has ever thought of trying a graphic novel, could not go wrong with this one. Don’t expect it to be an easy read, though. Each page is different from the one before and the reader has to navigate each page in unique fashion. Brilliant…or did I already say that?

I disegni volutamente semplici di questa graphic novel, con quel tratto pulito tipico delle bande dessinée francesi, fanno da controaltare ad una storia che semplice non lo è affatto.

I temi toccati in queste quasi 400 pagine di narrazione densa e non convenzionale sono infatti tra i più disparati:

L'infanzia, la solitudine, il bullismo, il sentirsi inadeguati, il rapporto con i genitori, il lutto, la povertà, la diffidenza, il destino, le catene dell'abitudine, lo squallore, l'indifferenza, la vecchiaia, la tristezza, rari attimi di felicità, la paura, la rassegnazione, la speranza.

Il tutto condito da salti temporali, cambi di punti di vista, film mentali, metanarrazione...

Insomma, non proprio una lettura leggera!

Per molti addetti ai lavori questo è il miglior fumetto di tutti i tempi.
Per me invece questa è senza dubbio una pietra miliare del fumetto mondiale che però non è riuscita a rispondere totalmente alle mie enormi aspettative.
Non me la sento di consigliarla a chi è alle prime armi in questo campo.

Pensé que me iba a gustar más, fue un poco meh.

I'm surprised that GoodReads doesn't allow a sixth star for this book alone. I can not say enough great things about Jimmy Corrigan. Honestly, it changed my life, and I can't imagine anyone not being in awe of its mathematics, literally and figuratively. This book is like the Catcher in the Rye for graphic novels. It raised the bar and it will not be matched for a very long time. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant. Breathtaking and deep. Brilliant.

2011 - 4*⭐
2020 [Releitura] - 5*⭐

Great art/technique, but this is wrist-slitting reading at best.

Review to follow.

There are a lot of things I would like to say about this book.

I love me some graphic novels but I don't pretend that the vast majority of them rise to the level of serious literature. Most of the time I look for the large number of books out there that are "clever" (as in, better than 90% of TV) as a mindless respite between novels. And in the case of ones such as Louis Riel, Berlin, or Maus, I get a little bit of education without trudging through a 600 page history book.

Jimmy Corrigan, though, is one of the five or six graphic novels I've read that have simply blown me away. It really has to be read and not explained, because I think that the taglines thrown on this book make it seem like any run of the mill "post-modern angst" book. And while this subject matter gets mined to death, it works here. Beautifully.

Oh, and Ware's art is a consistent revelation. It's always either relentlessly spare or bursting with detail, with very little in-between.

This is my third foray into the world of graphic novels. This book compels me to continue into this genre. Chris Ware tells a heart-rending story of loneliness, but what truly captured my admiration was the artwork. He does a sort of stylistic 180 from the narrative. While the story is intimate and emotional his images sort of stand back. He employs repeated frames of seemingly insignificant details, such as a bird moving along a tree branch. He emphasizes the alienation of the characters by focusing on the architecture, somewhat akin to the way John Ford uses long shots of mesas in Monument Vally in his westerns, or the way Ozu uses "pillow shots" in his movies. This makes the human drama stand out more when Ware does focus on the people. A small down-turned line on a face takes on greater significance as an emotional marker.

The one drawback is in the layout of the frames. I found it confusing at times. I had to think for a second, "which frame am I supposed to focus on next?" It interrupted the flow.