A reviewer usually takes a position of expertise:
I'm going to tell
you everything important about this thing, and you will
believe me. That works most of the time, even
all of the time if a particular reviewer is focused enough or arrogant enough.
Today I'm dropping that pose: I have a quirky book by a creator with a weird pseudonym, a book that starts out like a straightforward family memoir but radically changes genre before the end. I want to admit, up front, that I'm pretty sure this fits into the creator's career in a specific way and was taken by the original audience as a metaphor for something, but I can't tell you with any degree of confidence what those things are.
The creator is Zerocalcare - apparently, that was the jingle for a cleaning product, which the guy named Michele Rech started using as an online handle and then just kept using when he started making comics. (As someone with a blog and other social accounts under the name "G.B.H. Hornswoggler," I understand the impulse.)
The book is Forget My Name, originally published in 2014 in Zerocalcare's native Italy and translated by Carla Roncalli di Montorio for this 2022 American edition from Ablaze. If I'm reading the sequence on his Italian Wikipedia page correctly, it was his fifth book.
Now we get into what I think, or assume, or deduce. I'm pretty sure all of Zerocalcare's comics are about "him" - the guy in the black shirt on the cover is the author stand-in, with a life very much like the author's, who is the narrative voice and who readers are meant to assume is the author. And he is...at least to some degree.
Oh, sure, there's a talking armadillo representing his subconscious or better impulses or whatever, but that's a pretty common comics convention - comics are better at external stuff than internal, so cartoonists externalize dialogues and conflicts to make them clearer to draw. That's baked into comics: Zerocalcare's very first book was The Armadillo Prophecy, so his Italian readers would have been used to that by Forget.
And I took the shadowy figures on the covers similarly: I knew this was a family story, knew that the guy was the author, and figured it was a metaphor. Reader, it may well be a metaphor. But it is also a half-accurate version of an actual scene near the end of the book, taking place in what we are meant to believe is real life, after Zerocalcare learns a stunning (and physically impossible) truth about his family history.
So let me back up. Forget My Name is the story of Zerocalcare's relationship with his maternal grandmother, who died early in his adulthood but was a major figure when he was a child. It mixes light visual fantasy elements from the beginning - Zerocalcare and most of the background characters are drawn as human, but his mother (and her mother) are drawn as chickens and his father (not seen a lot) is a crane or something like that - but that all seems to be on the storytelling level. In the main story, Zerocalcare is helping clean out his grandmother's apartment, telling stories about how he remembered her to a convenient friend, and digging deeper into the secrets of her life.
And here I start wondering how much is "real." The big reveal at the end is some kind of metaphor, obviously - and I would have difficulty talking about what it could be a metaphor for without spoiling the book, so let me leave it as a signpost - but the earlier details, while quirky, all seemed plausible. Sure, this woman born in the 1920s was a semi-orphan, separated from her sister only to reunite much later. Sure, she was French. Sure, she was adopted and raised by émigré Russian aristocrats. Sure, she married a man who disappeared during WWII, with a family story that he was a partisan taken by the Nazis. And, sure, Zerocalcare only later realized that story made no sense since his mother was born in 1951. (Family stories often work like that: they simplify and paper over the uncomfortable bits.)
Each step is believable. Eventually, it leads to the revelation I won't explain. That is not believable. It drags the whole book over into metaphor, making the reader wonder how much of the earlier, plausible stories were equally metaphorical. And, to circle back to what I said at the very beginning, I have only wild theories about what the metaphor signifies. I was expecting something vaguely shameful - maybe the grandfather abandoned his family (once, or repeatedly), or was a collaborator during WWII, or went to prison later for something different, or just was from some racial/ethic group that his descendants don't want to think about.
The quirky thing is that the book isn't about the grandmother and her secrets. It's about Zerocalcare, his neuroses and concerns, his memories of childhood and what kind of person he is during this story. Everyone else is filtered through his viewpoint; other people exist as separate beings, I suppose, but they're not important the way the towering central ego of Zerocalcare is.
And his voice is compelling and personal, confessional and discursive, neurotic and thoughtful and endlessly self-reflective. His art is equally expressive - though, again, focused nearly always on the Zerocalcare character, the voice telling us this story.
I probably need to read more by Zerocalcare to get a better sense of what he's doing - to see how he tells other stories, how they turn into metaphors, how much fantasy he generally uses in his real-life stories. So, I'm left where I started: Forget My Name is interesting and smart and full of fascinating moments, with great insights and expressive art, but I just don't know how to take it. Let me leave it at that.