Book-A-Day 2018 #93: Fatherland by Nina Bunjevac

Every family has secrets. Every father is, to some degree, a mystery to his children.

But very few children have a father who was actually a terrorist, who blew himself up as part of an assassination plot. Nina Bunjevac, a Yugoslav-Canadian cartoonist, is in that unenviable position: her father died when she was still very young, in 1977, after Bunjevac's mother had fled with her and an older sister back to Yugoslavia to get away from her father's dangerous temper and activities.

That's a meaty subject for a graphic memoir, and Bunjevac tackled it in 2014's Fatherland, combining her own contemporary life with the story of her father's life and radicalization.

Fatherland begins with Bunjevac in the present day, and the reader expects something like Fun Home or Maus -- tying a parent's deep flaws back to the cartoonist, and the cartoonist coming to terms with it and moving forward with her life. But that's not the story Bunjevac is telling here: she moves from herself in the present day to her family in childhood (with a hiccup or two, as she runs through the same material more than once -- I suspect the pieces of Fatherland may have stood separately, originally, and aren't entirely integrated here) and then dives deeply into her father's life.

This is a book about Peter Bunjevac -- first, what he did to his family, and then how he turned into that man, and how he ended. Bunjevac sees her father entirely from outside: she knew him in life for only her first few years, and it sounds like relatives took a long time to come around to talking about Peter's many problems and demons.

Bunjevac has a compelling eye in Fatherland, and a photorealist stippling style that reminds me of Drew Friedman -- though the substance of their stories is very different. But I was left wondering about the people in this story: what does the adult Bunjevac feel about her father now? What about his beloved sister, who we see dropping into grief at his death? And what about her older brother, Peter Bunjevac's namesake, who was left behind in Canada when his mother and two sisters fled? The younger Peter Bunjevac is almost completely absent from this book, but he's the one I want to know about. What's it like to be the son of a terrorist, to have the same name and much the same face as your father the terrorist?

I may be, once again, looking for a book different from the one that actually exists -- I do that a lot. The shadow Fatherland in my head can always be more compelling than the real one, because it's not tied down by reality. But the real Fatherland is compelling and visually stunning; as a thing that actually does exist, it's pretty damn good.