So I may be coming into this from a strange angle, or otherwise badly - that's always the danger. I also should say that I try to figure out what a book is trying to do, and then think about how well it does that. I do understand, technically, what Hâsib and the Queen of Serpents is doing - retelling a story from The Thousand and One Nights - but the why of it is vaguer to me, leaving me with theories about nested narratives and stylized art and maybe a bit of exoticizing.
David B. is French - I see from Wikipedia that his "real" name is Pierre-François Beauchard - and has been working for thirty-some years; he's best known for the big autobiographical book/series Epileptic. (It's one book in English translation; it was six volumes as it came out in France. It has a very different title in French, too: l'Ascension du Haut Mal.) This is a fairly recent work of his: published 2015-16 in France, translated by Montana Kane for this 2018 US edition. I get the sense that he is important and major, but his works haven't been translated much - yes Epileptic, yes this book, but his bibliography is a sea of French titles with few indications of English editions - probably because he's "difficult" in one way or another, too French or too stylized or too personal or too something else I'm not thinking of.
What I'm saying is: this is a gorgeous, interesting book. It retells a world-famous story in an engaging way, with that deliberately archaic "I am telling you a story" language. The pages are full of visual delights.
But I have no idea why David B., or anyone, would choose to make a version of this story now. It's distanced, slightly chilly, in that classical story-telling way. It tells three nested stories, and the transitions between levels are quick and sometimes confusing. These are originally moral fables, more or less, with that very traditional moral "do the things expected of your class and station, and obey your God and King." But they're not strongly moral fables; they're also very much "shit happens" stories, a series of complications unexpected and unpredictable.
The frame story - literally a frame; with two characters bordering the images several times as it drops back out to the storytelling level - is Scheherazade telling this story to the King, that core idea of the 1001 Nights. (There's no indication here Scheherazade is telling stories to save her life; we're four-hundred-plus days in and presumably the King is hooked at this point.) Her main story is about Hâsib, a young man in what we eventually learn is Greece, though places are really just names here. He is the son of a great sage who died - which seems like it should be important, and never is - and goes to work for lumberjacks, who betray him when he discovers a great treasure.
But that leads to his meeting the Queen of Serpents, who both helps him and tells him the second story. (And then someone in the second story tells the hero of that story the third story. Eventually, we finish stories two and three and get back to Hâsib.) The heroes of two of the three stories get happy endings; the third may have happiness later. All is wrapped up by Scheherazade on the last page...which is the opposite of how the 1001 Nights are supposed to work.
But a book has to end somehow, with some kind of closure, so it's entirely reasonable. And it does frame the whole thing up nicely.
I loved looking at Hâsib and was amused by the convolutions of the tales without really engaging deeply. This is a distanced story by its nature; the reader is not going to identify with Hâsib or anyone else here: they're story-book characters, from "long, long ago," in a colorful and unrealistic world. For readers up for that kind of book, this is a good choice: it's particularly visually inventive, for fans of ornate comics art and designed pages.
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