All My Bicycles by Powerpaola

There's no right or wrong way to structure a memoir. But some are more distinctive or evocative than others - some make you think "that's interesting, that's different."

Powerpaola - the working name of a peripatetic South American cartoonist whose first name is indeed Paola - decided to tell stories around the bicycles she's had in her life. Where she was at that time, what she was doing, how each specific bicycle helped her get around the places she was living and what people it connected her to. (The edition I read was translated into English by Andrea Rosenberg,)

The book is All My Bicycles, and it doesn't go in chronological order, either. Powerpaola begins with three random bikes - she gives all of them quirky names throughout, or rather tells us the things she called each of them to differentiate them - that she had between 1996 and 2013, in three different cities on two different continents. She also begins the book by telling us she doesn't know how to end it, as if this first section is the last. From there, she moves backwards and forwards, with chapters on other bikes at other times, from her first as a young teen to a bike she used in Buenos Aires just a few years ago.

Her pages are busy, full of images that fill up their panels, all in a dark wash that's more brown than black, with occasional pops of contrasting colors. There's a lot of the natural world, dark and jungly, and even the cityscapes are busy and full of darkness, crammed with manholes and dark expanses of asphalt and barred windows.

There's no single story here: it's not that kind of memoir. Powerpaola sets up a possible overall narrative, about how she always runs away, in that first section, and that is one thread of the narrative throughout. But only one - she's more interested in specifics and moments and memories than in fitting all of her history into some tight schema to make a book out of it. Bicycles is a book of memories and thoughts, all "I remember that time" and "here's what this person meant to me then." It's not "what bicycles mean" - not to her, or to the world in general - but instead "here's my life, as seen through the lens of the bicycles I rode and the places I rode them through."