Quote of the Week: Party People, Circa 1971

The party rumbled on like a Hay Wain (as someone in the middle of it pointed out), carrying its cargo of fools towards the hour of their release. A lady lawyer spoke long sentences about international law as regards defacing the moon, and to each the cryogenics man nodded and smiled. The girl in the snood claimed that Thomas M. Disch was the author of a novel called Concentration Camp. Other girls, in leather bikinis, glass crinolines, wooded mail, foil tartans and plastic pinafores behaved as slightly animated decorations, receiving each conversation item with the same graceful indifference with which chair cushions received buttocks of all shapes. News, gossip, complements, pedantry, wit and philosophy, all were rested on them briefly and then removed, leaving no impression.

 - Johgn Sladek, The Müller-Fokker Effect, p.219 in SF Gateway Omnibus

Apache Delivery Service by Matt Kindt, Tyler Jenkins & Hilary Jenkins

There's a fine line between laconic and nonexistent; at times, Apache Delivery Service runs right along that line. Some readers might find it falls off to the far side. Writer Matt Kindt definitely lets the pictures do the storytelling most of the time here: on the positive side, that can be difficult for a writer, and he lets this story be visually compelling, quick-moving, and atmospheric by that choice.

Two men - we learn the name of the central one after following him for two issues, and the other's last name is said once, much later - are in Vietnam, in 1967. Ernie Nez is an Army tracker who calls in airstrikes, spending long stretches alone in the jungle to find enemy locations. His comrades call him the "Apache Delivery Service," but don't seem to know him at all as a person: he's actually Navajo, has no specific experience in tracking, hates killing and hasn't done any personally, and spends as much time as possible in the jungle to avoid his fellow soldiers.

At the beginning of this four-issue series, he comes back to base camp after one mission, talks to a few soldiers and superiors, and leaves again almost immediately: he's just trying to get through his tour, and the end is in sight.

But out in the jungle, he's captured by a man named Sobrat, a treasure hunter chasing a story of an Imperial Japanese admiral who hid "Nazi gold" in a cave somewhere in the area, at the end of WWII, only to be killed by the locals immediately afterward. (As with all such stories in fiction, we're not meant to wonder how anyone ever heard this story if everyone involved died immediately.) Sobrat, a Frenchman with a dark past, is somewhat older and does not seem to be under military orders.

He's been chasing this legend for a while, and now is close - but he says he needs a local guide, and apparently the only non-native who knows the area well is Ernie. So he basically kidnapped Ernie, tells him the story, and enlists him as a partner.

Ernie "agrees." We assume he doesn't trust Sobrat, and soon learns more reasons not to trust him. But, still: massive treasure, a chance to be rich beyond your wildest dreams, why not?

The two have a run-in with a local village, which we think protects the hidden treasure. There's talk of a curse. They escape. They find the gold. Sobrat is not as fond of sharing as Ernie would hope. Ernie is not as enthusiastic as Sobrat would like. The locals are lurking outside the caves, ready to kill them both as they walk out, burdened by heavy gold bars. It all ends.

Apache's description calls it a horror story, and Tyler Jenkins's scratchy, organic art, under Hilary Jenkins's moody, night-toned colors do set that mood. I may have more experience with more...expressive horror, in the Lovecraft tradition, full of descriptions and detail, so Apache read to me more as an adventure story - dark, clearly, but still well within the bounds of a normal Vietnam story. And, as I said up top, I would have preferred a bit more detail - Kindt and the Jenkinses use a lot of flashbacks to Ernie's pre-war life as visual parallel to this adventure, but I found that tended to undercut the supposed-horror aspects of the story. (If an experience reminds you of deer hunting and a car accident, it's pretty close to your normal life, isn't it?)

However you genre-type it, Apache Delivery Service is a dark, moody, fast-moving story of two men chasing gold in the middle of a war, told crisply with compelling art and a story that has no extraneous moments or pieces.

The Müller-Fokker Effect by John Sladek

This is Sladek's most New Wave novel - a lot of things happen, coming out of an initiating event, to a whole lot of people, and it is Satirical and Cutting and True To Our Times. Of course, Our Times were 1971, so it may strike modern readers as even quirkier or less relevant now than it did to readers then. (And the hardcore SF types mostly disliked it then, to be fair.)

The Müller-Fokker Effect is a novel that was not entirely written to thrust out that punny title - which would have seemed much more shocking in 1971 - but I have to think that was a huge part of it. It's a "look at all of these idiots" novel, about how the whole world is full of fools and knaves and con men and charlatans and every other kind of horrible person you can think of.

(It's available as a standalone, but I read it in the SF Gateway Omnibus with two better novels, the fun Reproductive System and the magnificent Tik-Tok.)

As much as it has a center, that's Bob Shairp, a technical writer for National Arsenamid - often called "National Arse" in dialogue, to give you a sense of the level of 1971 wordplay going on here - who is voluntold to be part of an experiment National Arse is doing with the US military, to record a human mind onto special Müller-Fokker tapes. Only four of those tapes exist, since Dr. Müller-Fokker has disappeared, supposedly defected to the Soviet Union.

All four tapes are used to record Bob, but a group of white-supremacist terrorists - deeply misunderstanding what's going on, in a very Sladek touch - attack during the experiment, killing Bob's body after his mind is recorded.

We get a bit of Bob's jumbled thoughts, here and there, during the novel, but more important is what happens to the four tapes, which are sold as government surplus and go in different directions, to let Sladek satirize various aspects of American society at the time: primarily nudie magazines, a typically corrupt evangelist, advertising, those white supremacists, and the military (including a military school for Shairp's son). Sladek gives us a lot of short scenes with a large cast, which somewhat crosses over among the various milieus that the tapes drop into, but they all are venial and self-centered and generally lousy people in their own ways - plus fairly dumb, too, of course.

The tapes separate, and then come back together in the end, so Bob can be resurrected and reunited with his wife. That gives the novel an ending, but it's not the point of the book: the point is all of the crazy stuff in the middle between Bob's death and resurrection. Bob is barely a character, and is dead most of the book.

That crazy stuff is OK but gets a bit tedious. The satirical targets are deeply obvious, so even when Sladek does hit them solidly, it doesn't feel particularly major. For example, the (frustrated, virginal) Hugh Hefner figure here learns, more than halfway through the novel, that women have pubic hair, which is shocking to him! This joke was only just barely plausible in the mid-'60s and was well past its sell-by date by the time this novel was published.

And none of the characters are appealing: yes, they're quirky and specific, but they are all horrible people and the reader is unlikely to care about what happens to any of them. (A lot of things do happen, some of which are horrible and a few of which are fatal - none of it really resonates beyond just a shrug and a page-turn.) All in all, The Müller-Fokker Effect is an interesting catalog of the nuttier aspects of American society circa 1971, as seen through a very dark lens, so it's of interest to cultural historians - but I can't really recommend reading it as a novel for pleasure in 2025.

Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate by Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert & George Freeman

To those confused by the attribution in my post title - this is the 1985 comics adaptation, not the 1976 Michael Moorcock novel. (Sidebar to the sidebar - the novel is divided into three novella-length sections, which are largely separate, but, as far as I can see, they were not published first as novellas as I expected, though two of the three seem to have been published later as novellas.)

See my post on Elric of Melniboné for more details on the adaptation series; I hope to read through at least all of the Elric books in comics form, and maybe then move on to other Eternal Champions stories, since Titan seems to have collected all of them in uniform trade dress these days. (And I am a major fan of big publishing projects and uniform trade dress, so I want to encourage that.)

By 1985 Roy Thomas had settled into the long haul in adapting Elric stories - he'd keep doing it through all of the extant novels at the time - and had landed at a publisher, First, that was somewhat more stable than Pacific had been. Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate was a seven-issue comics series, adapting a novel generally running about 160-190 pages into 198 pages of comics. So this, like the rest of the Roy Thomas series, is a comprehensive adaptation, aiming to capture every word of dialogue and story beat of the original in a visual form.

Sailor, the novel, was the first of many continuity inserts by Moorcock: the initial run of stories in the mid-60s (collected slightly later as Elric of Melniboné and Stormbringer) gave Elric's origin and fate, so every other story since has been filling the middle with more and more detail. This particular story starts in sturdy adventure-tale fashion: Elric has been fleeing some other adventure, and finds himself alone, tired, and hungry on the shore of a desolate sea.

A mysterious ship appears, claiming to have come to pick him up for some equally-mysterious purpose. It turns out to be one of the periodic gatherings of multiple Eternal Champion avatars - by never-defined forces that are probably related to the Lords of the Balance that Moorcock would introduce years later - to defeat a major threat to the entire multiverse. So Elric meets, for the first time for him - others are at slightly different points in their personal histories - Corum, Hawkmoon, and Erekosë - along with a dozen-plus other sword-swinging types, most of whom will die during this section to show how dangerous this threat is. The whole group of twenty is delivered, by this universe-sailing ship and its blind captain, to an island where two creatures from outside this universe are gathering power to do the usual apocalyptic thing if not stopped. The four ECs have to merge into a giant four-headed figure with a really, really big sword to kill the creatures, and they do so. Then they all seem to mostly forget about it, for vague mystical reasons.

Elric goes on to have two more adventures, with Count Smiorgan Baldhead, a new sidekick he picks up along the way. First, they land in another world where a Melnibonéan exile is chasing the reincarnation of the great love he tortured to death (Melnibonéans are horrible people, pretty consistently), while the third side of their love triangle, the guy who did not torture her to death, is chasing them. Elric helps the pursuer catch up, and justice is done and love reunited, more or less, though the reincarnated girl doesn't seem to have much of a choice in any of this and is handed off to the guy who is, I suppose, at least less horrible. 

Elric and Smiorgan try to head back to their own world, and end up rescued by a ship searching for the ancient original home of the Melnibonéans, deep in the usual fantasy jungle somewhere. They come along for the ride, where Stormbringer kills more allies than those allies would have liked, a giant statue of Elric's patron god Arioch comes to life, and Elric kicks off the Law/Chaos fight on his world that will eventually kill him. But he and Smiorgan do manage to find a ship, with which they can get back to civilized lands and be available for another continuity-insert novel.

Moorcock never claimed his heroic-adventure stories were great literature - he did write other books with more nuance and depth; he knew the difference - but they are flashy and exciting and full of portentous dialogue and Big Fantasy Ideas that seem to be more profound than they really are. They can be electric when you're young and tormented, and can still be fun and zippy even once you're not. As long as a reader is clear on the tone and style of the stories - High Weltschmertz and Deeply Meaningful - it's all good.

Michael T. Gilbert uses an ornate, detailed style here, ably supported by George Freeman's inks and colors - this book looks detailed and full of depth, as it should. It's a tale over-full of self-conscious woe, but that's the deal with Elric: if you're not in the mood for woe, you should stay away from him to begin with.

Graylight by Naomi Nowak

Naomi Nowak published three graphic novels in the Aughts - I missed the first one, Unholy Kinship, but covered the second one, House of Clay, for ComicMix at the time. And now I've finally found my way to the third book, 2009's Graylight.

At the time, I referred to her as "a cartoonist resident in Sweden, of Hungarian-Polish ancestry" and noted that she seemed to work in English. She might not be making comics, but she seems to still be in Sweden, and still making art - paintings and jewelry, these days. I don't want to say art is art - I like to see narrative work, and have a bias in that direction - but it's great to see artists having what looks like a reasonably sustainable career, making the things they want to.

Graylight is an allusive, imagistic book, colored out to the edge of the pages in tones that look just a bit desaturated to my eye - a unique, particular palette surrounding and supporting Nowak's complex lines and complicated page structures. Lines defining people sometimes fade out or end unexpectedly, while objects - especially thematically important ones, seem to be closer to the surface of the page and shown in more detail.

The underlying story isn't as complex as the way Nowak tells it: there's a young woman, Sasha, in this unnamed village that we assume is somewhere in Sweden. She's a bit flighty and self-centered: we see her with her friends and meeting a reporter, Erik, in town to interview a famous reclusive author, Aurora, who lives in the woods nearby.

Sasha impulsively - we think she does everything impulsively; she's that kind of young person - goes along with Erik as his "photographer," though we don't see her holding a camera at any point. Aurora and her grown son Edmund are not happy there's someone else with Erik for the interview, so Sasha flounces off, but not before (impulsively) stealing a book from Aurora's house.

Sasha, over the next few days, starts a no-strings relationship with Erik - this somewhat frustrates him, since he wants more. 

There's also something of a curse that starts to hit her, in ways Nowak presents almost entirely imagistically. Aurora knows she has stolen the book, and believes Sasha has the same kind of power she does - she's a witch, more or less, and calls on two others like her to make the traditional trinity to call down her curse on Sasha.

There's also what the book description calls a love triangle - Edmund hangs around, watching Sasha during the days before the curse comes on - but it's not entirely clear if he's in love with her, fascinated with her as an example of the outside world he's unfamiliar with, or just keeping an eye on her for his mother. In any case, he eventually comes to see her, as the curse starts affecting her more strongly, and retrieves the book and breaks the curse (these may be the same action).

Again, Nowak tells this story through gesture - drawn in an idiosyncratic way - and allusive dialogue and imagistic pictures, rather than by explaining in any detail. It's a visually fascinating book, full of striking images, with a story that I suspect different readers will take in somewhat different ways.

So many comics are easily pigeon-holed; it's refreshing to find one as specific and different, in both style and substance, as this one.

Better Things: Add It Up

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

It's probably cheating for me to call this song a favorite: I didn't hear it at the time.

I don't know exactly when I got into the Violent Femmes - the dates in iTunes just tell me they were part of my initial massive loading project in late '03 - but it was late enough that my copy of their iconic 1983 self-titled first record is the 20th anniversary edition. (Maybe I had the old version earlier, but, even in the best case, I was at least a decade late - I think I discovered them with the Add It Up compilation in the early '90s.)

So that's why this song wasn't part of This Year two years ago - I didn't hear it that year.

But the thing about time is that it's always getting later. Things are only new once, but they can be good forever. And I did discover that first Violent Femmes record, and loved it, as you should too. (Although it is possible to be too old on first hearing to love it, I think: there's something inherently young about early Violent Femmes, that gnawing longing of youth.) Blister in the Sun and Kiss Off are equally awesome, and Gone Daddy Gone not far behind them.

But the best song, at least for me right at this moment today, is Add It Up, one of the quintessential songs of teenage angst, desire and despair. (Singer Gordon Gano wrote most of that record while he was still in high school in Milwaukee, and it shows.)

It is one of the best ever "c'mon baby, we're both virgins but we should totally fuck right now" songs, building on a tradition of decades of songs that were more circumspect and less overtly horny to be clearly the next stage, the punk stage in that tradition.

But I look at your pants and I need I need a kiss
Why can't I get just one screw?
Why can't I get just one screw?
Believe me I know what to do
But something won't let me make love to you

The Femmes had a magnificent sound as well - punky but acoustic, propulsive and demanding, stark and loud and true, the sound of three guys committing totally to this song in this moment with their minimal gear and their raw energy. I think their longer early songs, especially this one and Kiss Off, give them the best scope to explore all the aspects of that sound - both also have excellent live versions on that Add It Up compilation.

Rock and roll is about fucking, when you come right down to it: it's why so many parents and bluestockings tried to ban it for so long. (Not just rock and roll, of course: vast swaths of popular music are about fucking; people like fucking.) And this is deeply in that tradition, late enough that it can be much more obvious about it than, say My Ding-a-Ling.

So, in your own life, when you need to make a life-changing decision, stop and

Wait a minute honey
I'm gonna add it up

Quote of the Week, Supplemental: You See But You Do Not Observe

People who know magic isn't real look straight at a ghost and see a flapping bed sheet. They deal with an irrefutable demonstration of how things really are the way an oyster deals with a speck of grit. The truth gets coated in a hard, shiny shell that can be worn proudly. A pearl is a lie you can roll between your teeth.

 - Kim Newman, Something More Than Night, p.37

Quote of the Week: A Lesson for Life

Realists are always getting intro trouble. They miss the sweet, easy victories of the daydreamer.

 - James Thurber, "The Case for the Daydreamer," pp.325 in Writings and Drawings

Something More Than Night by Kim Newman

There's more than a little discussion of the differences between mystery and horror in Kim Newman's 2021 novel Something More Than Night. Which is appropriate, because the book itself somewhat tries to split the difference - though, in the end, it falls solidly into horror, with the actions of the protagonists not being dispositive, with big set-piece scenes that run on for shock and effect, with pure monsters and their makers, with mad science and shocking transformations and deep lore and unpleasant truths about the way the world really is.

It also may be part of a longer sequence of Newman's works - there's a secondary antagonist, or maybe I mean a higher-level antagonist, named Ariadne, who appears on stage briefly only once but who is said to be something like the source of all evil in the world and who was part of a (mentioned but not narrated) major transformative event for our two main characters in their youth.

Frankly, for quite a while, Something More Than Night reads like maybe the fourth or fifth book in a series, with references to previous adventures and that origin story involving Ariadne. It's not, as far as I can tell - it seems to stand alone - but if Ariadne turns up in other Newman works, that could explain some of the odd aspects of the book.

This is a high-concept secret-history book, somewhat in the Tim Powers mode: famous people battling supernatural dangers in ways that illuminate their work in the real world. The famous people this time are author Raymond Chandler and actor Boris Karloff, who were English schoolboys at the same time in the same town, though they went to different schools. (Karloff was Billy Pratt in those days - Hollywood changes so many names along the way.) The third main character is their friend and mentor Joh Devlin, a DA investigator-turned-PI.

The three, in Newman's fictional world, spent much of the Thirties investigating creepy cases, in between their better-known work, and stopping at least a few fiends in human form. There's no specifics of supernatural elements mentioned about those previous cases, but there's no reason to believe they weren't supernatural, either. The mysterious, ages-old femme fatale Ariadne - who was invoked at some kind of ritual when Ray and Billy were schoolboys, at which they were among, and possibly the only, survivors - is behind some or most or all of these events, though we don't learn who she is or what she does or even what kind of a creature (vampire? goddess? human with mesmeric powers? something different or older?) she is.

We hope, in the early pages of this novel, that Something will be the story of their final confrontation with Ariadne, and to end with revelations to explain all of that. It is not, and does not. Hence my thinking that Ariadne is something like Brust's Devera: a motif or linking element more than an element of this novel.

Something also has an odd structure: it flashes back and forth multiple times, with a lot of sections of wildly different lengths, and jumps from mostly following Chandler's first-person narration to a couple of long chapters in third-person from Devlin's point of view. It's set in the late Thirties, it says, but the two main time periods seem to both be after The Big Sleep was published, and that was February of 1939.

Anyway, after the novel itself does some obfuscation with the timeline and sets up things that it doesn't entirely plan to explain, we settle into the main plot: Devlin pulls in Chandler and "Karloff" to investigate Ward Home Junior, a movie mogul and scion of a oil family - Newman is loading both barrels to show this guy is stereotypically California rich - who was just in some kind of a bizarre accident at his palatial home in the sprawling Home compound.

It turns out that Home's pet doctor Vaudois and the doctor's oversized, creepy assistant Norman Quin have developed a mad-science device for transferring "special abilities" - in this case, mostly side-show-freak things like quick healing or super flexibility - from one person to another. And the major test of that device left Home on fire, so that he's now recuperating at the Lamia Munro Clinic, also part of the Home compound.

First Devlin investigates the basement laboratory of Home's house - which is as full of horrors as might be expected, and where he learns that only one other subject survived the experiment, a woman now calling herself Laurel Ives, whose "special abilities" aren't exactly detailed but seem to include some manner of extended life or limited vulnerability.

(She also does not seem to have lost this ability from the experiment, though we see later in the book that abilities are taken away during the transference procedure with another character. I'm not sure if that's a plot hole, meant to be a clue as to "Ives's" true nature, or something else.)

Soon afterward, Chandler and Karloff go to the Munro Clinic, where they rapidly get in over their heads: Home is not only not in a coma, he's healthier than ever before, close to a foot taller, and possessed of near-superpowers. It all leads up to a big scene in a courtyard in the rain, where Karloff gets some special abilities himself, but our heroes do, eventually, get away, after yet more horror-movie scenes.

As I said, this is a horror story, so our main characters don't gather their forces and battle the monsters to save the world - that would be fantasy. They also don't find out exactly how it works, figure out how to counter it, and do so - that would be a thriller. And they don't gather evidence and present it to some authority who can shut down Home - that would be a mystery.

What they do is lie low and hope not to get killed, with a few more sections with varying timeframes finally coming back to the cliffhanger established way back at the beginning of the book. There is a more-or-less happy ending, but in the dying-fall mode: the characters don't initiate it, or have much to do with it, but they do realize that things have worked out in their favor, and are able to brush their hands together, say "well, that's that, then" and end the novel cleanly.

It's not the most satisfying ending one could have hoped for. Ariadne is resolutely not explained, let alone defeated. Home won't be a problem going forward, we think, but there's no reason the process his minions developed can't be used again, by just about anyone. Think of it as a sequel hook, if that makes it better, I suppose.

On the positive side, Newman does a good mock-Chandler throughout - it's not the same voice Chandler used to write his novels, but it feels authentic and has quite a bit of fine writing of its own. Newman's characters, though sometimes types - especially his villains - are interesting and well-drawn, and the central relationship between Chandler and Karloff is well-depicted and plausible. Something More Than Night, I found, is over-complicated in the telling and full of things that don't seem to begin or end in this book, but, all in all, it's a pleasant historical horror novel that does what it sets out to do: tell an untold, unexpected story of the friendship of Raymond Chandler and Boris Karloff.

Dear Beloved Stranger by Dino Pai

Everyone has one book in them, they say. Usually the "how I got here" story - whatever was unique or special or striking about childhood or life in general. I don't think that's dismissive; I like to think of it as celebratory: everyone can make at least one work of art, if they put in the time and effort and have the drive.

And when I come across a book that is "how I got here," I wonder if this was the one book, or the springboard to a continuing career.

Dino Pai's first major work was the 2013 graphic novel Dear Beloved Stranger. It's somewhat autobiographical: Pai was a new graduate from art school, and his central character here is a new art school graduate named Dino. I never want to assume with semi-autobiographical stories, though: "semi" is a huge territory, and just using your own name doesn't mean any particular moment or thought is taken from life.

Stranger is largely about the desire to create: Dino is out of school, looking for a job without much luck so far, and feeling stuck. So he starts making a story, after running into former classmate Cathy. That story is the story we're reading, more or less, framed by letters to an unnamed "Dear Beloved Stranger." I thought there was going to be some romantic tension with Cathy, or that she was the one Dino was writing to - I'm not sure if that was my misreading, Pai making that a possibility deliberately, or an unfortunate choice in the work.

But Cathy is really just the catalyst here, so making her an attractive classmate, of the gender Dino is attracted to, feels like a distraction - she could have been a male classmate, or a teacher, or some other mentor, and that would have made that role more distinct from the "Dear Beloved Stranger." (Of course, maybe the answer is Pai wanted that ambiguity, or simply that "Cathy" was the real person in Pai's actual life, and that bit is less "semi" and more fully autobiographical.)

The book is in multiple sections, in somewhat different art styles: the story of the young artist Dino, the work he's creating, and how they merge together in the end. Pai moves from mostly greyish tones for the "real" scenes and soft colors for the fantasy sequences, both with an attractively detailed, just-this-side-of-fussy style.

We do learn who the stranger is in the end; I won't spoil that here. It's personal and important for Dino, and probably equally so for the real Pai, but I did wish it had been weaved in earlier in the book, and that Cathy wasn't there as such an obvious red herring. But the story is satisfying; we feel for Dino and think that Pai did well in this first major work.

And if we then search to see what he's done since - which I did - we find that he's mostly been working in animation since then, making stories, but that he seems to have done some comics as well. I'm always happy to see that: I want creators to keep creating, for the people who make "here's how I broke through and actually started making art" stories to keep doing that, in whatever ways they can and want to. So Dear Beloved Stranger was the beginning, but there's more after it: this launched Dino Pai, and he's been going since then.

The Interview by Manuelle Fior

With some creators, you hit the piece you love the most first, and spend the rest of your time wandering through their work, looking for something else that will give you that same sense of energy and power.

Manuele Fior is one of those for me: I've enjoyed all of his books since, but nothing has hit me like 5,000 km per second. He's a somewhat cerebral and assured maker of comics, working in soft tones (in this case, of blacks and greys, but more recently in color), who often uses SFnal themes in his work in a matter-of-fact, sophisticated way. I'd still send new readers to 5k kmps, but science fiction readers in particular will find a lot of interest in books like Celestia and Blackbird Days.

And also this one: The Interview, originally published in 2013 and translated by Jamie Richards for this 2017 American edition.

Like many of Fior's works, it's SFnal, set in 2048. Somewhere in Italy, Raniero is a fiftyish psychologist - he works from a hospital in the city, but lives in a suburban home, out in a zone not entirely safe since the unspecified Uprisings not too long ago. We think the Uprisings were pretty major - there are hints that Italy, or all of Europe, is now Balkanized - but Fior doesn't explain when or how or what it was. There was a major political/social disjunction, maybe a few years back, and it is still reverberating.

One of the reverberations is The New Convention, a movement among the younger generation. There is a manifesto laying out the principles, and we hear a bit about that - it sounds strident and demanding and visionary, all in ways that seem deeply unrealistic to those not committed to it, in the ways of all manifestos. The main tenets, or the ones that outsiders focus on, are the rejection of monogamy - the book description calls it "free love and alternative models to coupling and family." So not quite '60s communalism come again, but something very close - New Conventioneers seem to live in groups as well.

New Convention seems to be a positive, loving thing - all of those twenty-somethings fucking each other in whatever permutations they want, whenever they want - but there is also random violence in this world, with gangs of house-breakers roaming the now-dangerous suburbs, and it's not clear if they are connected to New Convention by anything but their shared youth.

One evening, Rainero is driving home, talking on his phone with a colleague. He sees something mysterious in the sky, glowing inverted pyramids or triangles. He crashes his car, runs out to see the apparition. He doesn't tell his wife Nadia about the vision, or his friend Franco who comes out to their house that night to tow the car away for repair.

But the next day, he has a new patient: a young woman, Dora, one of the New Convention. She's been institutionalized by her parents, because she claims to be telepathic, to be in communication with aliens. She says she sees them, glowing pyramids in the sky - most recently the night before.

Meanwhile, Raniero's wife Nadia is separating from him. We don't know exactly why, but we think Raniero has been distant, and maybe too much living in the past - the suburban house, the gas-powered old-fashioned car. She's picking out a new apartment in the city, and he goes with her to look at it. They're separating, but it's a polite, quiet, civilized separation - maybe because it's not inevitable, maybe because she hopes he can change, maybe because a dozen maybes. But she's moving out.

Before she goes, though, their suburban home is attacked by masked criminals one night - they are tied up, roughed up, Nadia threatened with rape, jewelry and valuables stolen. The thugs seem to have been sent specifically by someone - they say to each other that they were told not to hurt the couple too much.

Through these days, Raniero works with Dora, talks with her - about her "delusions," about the Convention. She's said to be very beautiful, though the way Fior draws her - that's her on the cover, big nose and all - does not strike me as notably attractive. Raniero is sexually attracted to her, of course - and, as part of the Convention, we suppose she's interested on some level. (The promiscuous must always want to have sex with us, right? Since we are clearly wonderful and special, since we are us.)

Events escalate. Raniero meets other members of Dora's communal living group, learns more about the Convention and what Dora thinks the aliens want her to do. And the pyramids come back, in a major way, in larger numbers, so that no one can deny they exist.

But The Interview, the bulk of it, is not the story of the world or the aliens - it's Raniero's story, of how meeting Dora, working with her, seeing the glowing pyramids, changed him, diverted his life. So the main story ends with him, with the decisions he made.

Well, I say his decisions - Fior might not agree. There's a coda at the end, that provides the title: it's a hundred years later, and Dora is being interviewed as a beloved, respected, world-famous leader. Her telepathy is now ubiquitous, and it's implied that human relationships are vastly different, now that everyone can read minds - this seems to be more of a "flash of insight" telepathy than a "I can see all your thoughts in real time" telepathy, but I don't put too much weight on that distinction. Over time insights build on each other.

The world seems civilized and stable; we hope it's better than our own, or the world we saw in 2048. The people in it think the aliens didn't mean to do anything - if they even were intelligent aliens, not just some bizarre natural phenomenon - but the glowing pyramids, whatever they were, just passed through our space, and caused changes in their wake.

The Interview is a book full of ideas and thoughts: like a lot of Fior, it will not explain or declaim those ideas. They're in the weave, to be plucked out and examined, intrinsically part of the story. This one might not have grabbed me quite as deeply as 5k kmps, but it's a deep, thoughtful, capacious SF story with a depth of nuance and gesture rare in comics.

The Last Flower by James Thurber

This is the second of what will be four or five posts on the Library of America James Thurber Writings and Drawings volume. I'm reading it in chunks, since I'm not the man that can go straight through a thousand-page book these days, and most of those chunks are excerpts from the various books Thurber published, because LoA didn't want to put out a multi-volume complete Thurber for whatever reason (I'm guessing budget or space on the list or a sense of his importance; mostly likely a combination of all three).

The first post was titled after The Seal in the Bedroom and My Life and Hard Times. This one is slightly sillier, since I'm going to write about two hundred-odd pages of Thurber under the name of a short fabulistic drawn book from the eve of WWII. The Last Flower is available as a separate book, if you want it that way.

See that first post for more details on Thurber and the LoA book, if you care.

The clump I got to this time is from the late Thirties: extensive selections from the two collections The Middle-Aged Man on the Flying Trapeze and Let Your Mind Alone!, and then Last Flower itself.

Middle-Aged Man is a mixture of fiction and non-fiction - or, rather, has a bunch of stories about mostly married couples, some of which are explicitly framed as reminiscences of Thurber, and some of which have characters described in the third person and given other names. They're all in the same tone and style, all in that Thurber voice, and they work well together as a collection. (I have no idea how much else was in the original book, or how similar it was; compiler Garrison Keillor edited out some unknown amount of material from all of these books to fit it into a single LoA volume.) There are a few autobiographical pieces that are not about men and women, too, I should mention. Particularly the famous "If Grant Had Been Drinking at Appomattox," which many readers may have found in some anthology somewhere or other.

Let Your Mind Alone! is a somewhat more themed collection - the full title includes and Other More or Less Inspirational Pieces. Let Your Mind Alone! itself is a series of ten linked essays about a bunch of then-well-known pop-psychology books; Thurber returns to the same four or five writers repeatedly over the course of the series. All the books seem to be in the "how to be happy" mode, aimed at a relatively affluent, urban, educated audience - I'm pretty sure this series of essays was in The New Yorker originally; it's exactly that sort of audience - and Thurber takes a very dim view of all of their recommendations and ideas. It's amusing, but not particularly relevant, ninety years later - we've had at least a dozen different pop-psych phases since then, and this one is quite musty and unfamiliar, although the general outlines don't change all that much.

Also from Let Your Mind Alone! comes eight miscellaneous pieces - pretty much along the same lines as the ones in Middle-Aged Man, and equally amusing. These tend to skew more towards autobiography, though it also included one of Thurber's best-known man/woman stories, "The Breaking Up of the Winships."

And then The Last Flower was published in November of 1939, and apparently made very quickly just before that time: it could be seen as a very early graphic novel, telling its story with one big image to each page with a caption underneath. (The alternative interpretation is that it's a picture-book format, like so many books for children, only this one is for an adult audience.) It starts in the aftermath of "World War XII," which led to the collapse of civilization. Most of humanity is full of anomie and despair, for the usual fabulist unspecified period of time, but one young woman and one young man nurture the last flower in the world, which leads to the rebirth of civilization...and, then, inevitably, to the next world war, which reduces the world to only one man, one woman, and one flower.

I see that Last Flower is generally considered guardedly optimistic, even with its cyclical destruction. But I instead see escalation in it: WW XII destroys civilization but leaves a large number of people alive to go on; WW XIII kills all but two people. Clearly, to my pessimistic mind, the next cycle will finish the job entirely.

Thurber is a somewhat limited writer: he had a distinctive style and set of concerns (Last Flower is mostly outside of those, though, I should say) which he turned into a stream of amusing and thoughtful pieces for about thirty years. For most of us, a thousand pages of Thurber would be too much all at once, but two hundred pages or so - like I did this time - is a fine dose, and I recommend it.

Better Things: All I Want Is You

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

This is one of my favorite love songs: big, bold, demanding, overwhelming, all-encompassing, so long it almost exhausts itself by the end.

For this week, the song is All I Want Is You by U2.

You say you want
Diamonds on a ring of gold
Your story to remain untold
Your love not to grow cold

It's from 1988, which means I first heard it new, as an eighteen-year old. If there's a better audience for "big, bold, demanding, overwhelming, all-encompassing" love songs than a teenager, I don't know it - I was poised to love big emotions, giant gestures, strong stances. And U2 delivered: their '80s work was always big in all the important ways, and they worked on weaving subtlety in, in fits and starts, as their careers went on.

It has that classic-era Edge guitar sound, supple and rippling, ringing throughout - sounding like nothing and no one else, rising up at the first chorus and rising and falling in the music after that.

It has one of Bono's best vocal performances, relatively subdued, world-weary, straightforward. He always had the vocal power, but didn't always want to rein it in - here, he does, to great effect.

What's it about? All the things lovers tell each other - especially promise each other - the plans they make and the goals they set and the dreams they have, maybe especially the big expansive ones the two do not 100% share.

All the promises we break
From the cradle to the grave
When all I want is you

Books Read: November 2025

Here's a list of the books I read in the past month. As always, it's mostly an index, and almost entirely for my own use later. Also, the posts about these books mostly haven't gone live yet, so I'll be updating this later to include those.

Naomi Nowak, Graylight (11/1)

Roy Thomas, Michael T. Gilbert, and George Freeman, Elric: The Sailor on the Seas of Fate (digital., 11/2)

John Sladek, The Muller-Fokker Effect (in SF Gateway Omnibus, 11/2)

Matt Kindt, Tyler Jenkins, and Hilary Jenkins, Apache Delivery Service (11/8)

Doug Savage, Laser Moose and Rabbit Boy: Time Trout (digital, 11/9)

Jack Vance, Marune: Alastor 933 (in Alastor, 11/9)

Lodovic Debeurme, Renée (11/14)

Tom Toro, And to Think We Started as a Book Club... (digital, 11/16)

Richard Wolinksy, ed., Space Ships! Ray Guns! Martian Octopods! (11/16)

Ulf K., Hieronymus B.: 1997-2007 (11/21)

Bill Griffith, Photographic Memory (digital, 11/22)

Jim Henson, Jerry Juhl, and Roger Langridge, Jim Henson's The Musical Monsters of Turkey Hollow (11/23)

P.G. Compton, The Continuous Katherine Mortenhoe (11/23)

Walker Tate, Laser Eye Surgery (digital, 11/27)

Charles Dickens, A Christmas Carol (in Christmas Books, 11/27)

Jennifer Hayden, Where There's Smoke, There's Dinner (digital, 11/28)

Asher Perlman, Hi, It's Me Again (digital, 11/29)

P.G. Wodehouse, Spring Fever (11/29)

Debbie Tung, My Perfectly Imperfect Body (digital, 11/30)

Loren D. Estleman, Burning Midnight (11/30)

Next month I'm pretty sure I will read more books.

Reviewing the Mail: Week of December 6, 2025

I was getting a movie from the library for my weekly "Movie Night" with my twenty-something kids, and thought "why not look at the ongoing list of books and see if I want to read any of them now?" And so I did, and so I requested these two, and so they were pulled for me.

If you have a local library, check to see if they do this - being able to request specific books online and have them held for you is a really neat feature. (Especially if you already have too many books in the house and are trying not to overly increase that number.)

Here's what I just got, which I'm actually reading this very weekend (one yesterday, one today):

The sixth book in the Asterix series by René Goscinny and Albert Uderzo: Asterix and Cleopatra. I read the first three in the current, too-small-for-my-aging-eyes omnibus, then jumped to the older album-sized English-language version for #4, Asterix the Gladiator. #5 is not available as a standalone in my library system, and plot/theme/character development does not seem to be a huge issue with these books, so I just moved on to the next one.

Um. And a misaimed search at that big e-commerce site gave me the surprising revelation that there was a recent French live-action series of Asterix movies? How did they find a lead actor short enough?

And the third (of a planned four) book in George O'Connor's current mythology-retold-for-younger-readers series, Asgardians, is Loki, just published this past fall. The first two books in Asgardians were Odin and Thor, as you'd expect; I haven't seen any hints as to who will be covered in #4. O'Connor previously did a long series about the Greek gods, as Olympians, and his work is detailed and smart, filled with insights from myth and fable and told in modern, compelling ways with complex characterization and a muscular, adventure-comics art style. (He also gets in a lot more quirky material than some people might expect from that "young readers" above - his books are suitable for smart middle-schoolers rather than aimed at them, is how I'd put it.)

Quote of the Week: How a Lying Liar Lies

"The chief thing," I advised them, "is not to let her tire you out. When you catch her in a lie, she admits it and gives you another lie to take its place and, when you catch her in that one, admits it and gives you still another, and so on. Most people - even women - get discouraged after you've caught them in the third or fourth straight lie and fall back on either the truth or silence, but not Mimi. She keeps trying and you've got to be careful or you'll find yourself believing her, not because she seems to be telling the truth, but simply because you're tired of disbelieving her."

 - Nick Charles in Dashiell Hammett's The Thin Man, p.893 in Complete Novels

The Disappearance of Charley Butters by Zach Worton

Charley Butters is probably dead. He was a painter in his mid-life during the later 1950s, so by the time of this 2015 graphic novel - set, as far as I can tell, basically contemporaneously - he would have been at least in his eighties. But there are two more books in this series, so I suppose he may show up as a centenarian eventually.

This is not really the story of Charley Butters, though. He's in the title, and his model and mystery is important, yes. But it's the story of Travis, a young man who works in a record store and sings in a black metal band.

Travis and his two bandmates are going off into the woods with filmmaker Stuart, to gesticulate and grimace in extreme makeup - they're making a video. The four guys are bickering, complaining about each other, nagging, picking on each other - they're grumpy and combative, in a bad mood.

That's probably good for death metal, though. You don't want to be too happy when you're invoking the devil.

After a couple of hours of mugging in one clearing, they head over to their next filming location - but stop when they see an old shack. Maybe there's something cool there they can put into the video?

They "break" into the shack - the door was jammed shut but not locked, and the place is decades old, untouched for who knows how long. Inside, they find a lot of notebooks, some old canned goods, and what looks like a couple of dozen versions of the same painting.

This was Charley Butter's cabin: he built it, after running away from the art scene in whatever the local city is. (This is set somewhere in Canada, probably around one of the smaller cities in Ontario - creator Zach Worton is from Mississauga, so that can be Guess #1.) The guys poke through his stuff, realize he was a "schizo," and head off to finish up the video.

But Travis comes back later, to collect all the notebooks, to read Butters' diaries. He's becoming fascinated with what I suppose I should call The Disappearance of Charley Butters.

Travis is unhappy - he started this band on a lark, but it's not his kind of music, and central figure Mike is an alcoholic asshole with very particular, demanding notions of what's appropriate for black metal. So he quits the band, cuts his hair, starts dating a girl named Kat, and spends a lot of time reading the Charley Butters notebooks.

Parallel to Travis's story, we get flashbacks to Butters - he has a successful gallery show, but starts having auditory hallucinations, which leads him out to that wooded cabin. He becomes entirely reclusive, avoiding all people.

Travis is becoming fascinated with Butters' story - and, coincidentally, so is Stuart, the filmmaker who made their video. The two decide to make a documentary about Butters, with Travis as the on-camera interviewer and Stuart directing. Their first interview is with Butter's wife (ex-wife? widow?) Eleanor, which doesn't go well - Travis keeps interrupting her, and asking the wrong questions first - and gets cut off early.

But they still want to make the documentary. That's where this book ends: they know that Butters existed, that he lived in the woods for a while and then wandered off somewhere else, and they intend to keep investigating.

Worton has a fine storytelling eye here; he's mostly working in a four-panel grid, and has a crisp style that's particularly good in silent panels and contemplative moments. The story is obviously not done, but what's here is satisfying enough while clearly being the first part of a longer piece. (Worton did make two more graphic novels to complete the trilogy between 2016 and 2018; I haven't seen them yet.)

The Incal, Vol. 2: The Luminous Incal by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius

I used to work in the book-mines, years ago, so I notice things about the veins of books and how they've been hewn out of the rock. This time, I noticed that the cover of the second book in a series has wandered off from the trade dress established by the first book - though the title page, inside, has the same typography (generally) as the cover of book 1, The Black Incal.

What does that mean? Well, in my experience, it's either a designer, editor, or publisher - or even all three - who likes tinkering, who wasn't quite happy, who didn't value consistency. Or who just forgot and didn't bother to check their work.

Well, I might have to take that back. The cover of this book in the digital platform where I read it is different from the design of the first book - but the cover on Amazon is in the same style as book 1. They also have the main image flipped from each other - in Hoopla, John DiFool is running right; on Amazon, he's breaking left. See Hoopla up top and Amazon slightly lower and to the right, so John is running towards himself.

As far as I can tell, the current republishing of the Incal series by Alexandro Jodorowsky and Mœbius is only available digitally, so the question of which cover is "real" is somewhat academic: Humanoids can (and maybe has) changed the cover at any time, since it's just one JPG in a digital file. (Wait, is it a JPG? Maybe a PNG? I don't think the whole thing is a PDF. Now I want to dig into the file to find out, and that would be silly cat-vacuuming.)

Anyway, I'm vamping to avoid actually talking about The Luminous Incal, second in the six-book space-opera series. This was early in the Jodorowsky/Mœbius collaboration, so it was still fairly a straightforward adventure story, with only a light glazing of mysticism for spice. (That would ramp up in later years.) But it's still a lot of running around and people loudly declaiming things - often with silly names - as Big Important Stuff happens repeatedly, only to be overshadowed by the Even More Important Stuff, and so on.

This book is very much middle. We start with John having been captured by the Technopope and his Technominions - TP doesn't use his prefix quite as lavishly as the Metabaron does, but it does pop up repeatedly - and will be sacrificed to a giant mechanical spider (?) to further the TP's goals of conquering the universe. But John's pet/partner, Deepo the concrete seagull (??) is still free, and smashes through the giant black orb floating above the TP's head, which is not itself the Black Incal, but somehow focuses or gathers the TP's power. That allows John to run away with Deepo, into a giant containment thingy called the Inside/Outside, where he is attacked by the fiendish Cardioclaw (the monster on the cover).

Meanwhile, the Metabaron is metastalking through a metasnowy landscape to get to the Technopope's Techno City, killing a squad of Bergs - an alien race from another galaxy also seeking the incals - along the way.

John kills the Cardioclaw, which super-ages the Technopope and makes Techno City collapse - or maybe his taking the black incal did that, which was somehow tied to the Cardioclaw. Anyway, John emerges from the Inside/Outside with both incals and is immediately met, in the wreckage of Techno City, by a bare-breasted woman, to whom he gives the black incal during a mystical moment without much dialogue. She disappears, and he immediately tries to chase her. (She's Animah, and will be important as the series goes on, as you might guess from the super-portentous name.)

John is metacaptured by the Metabaron, who metadelivers him to his current metaemployer, Tatanah, the head of the Amok rebels. Those rebels have been battling to capture Shaft City, the seat of government (at least on Earth), as we've seen in moments throughout the book so far, and they are close to the Prezident, a handsome but corrupt and stupid leader who flees to his superior, the Emperoress, who I think rules all of human space, while the Prezident just handles Earth (and not very well).

There's a lot of confused fighting, with ever-more powerful superweapons brought out by one side and the other, with their names yelled out in tones of awe by the other side, along with the inevitable many deaths and vast destruction, all reported on gleefully by media personalities.

Tatanah betrays the Metabaron, planning to kill him, John, and the Metabaron's son Solune, who she was holding as a hostage. But those three slaughter a vast number of Amok rebels, and a government superweapon - the Necrodroid, the last piece of the escalation ladder I mentioned last paragraph - breaks even more stuff.

Tatanah's lieutenant Kill Wolfhead - who is, indeed, a guy with the head of a wolf whose job is to kill people, so full marks there on clarity - arrives, to find only main characters left alive. Since they are all main characters, they have to put their differences aside and travel together deep into the earth, to the secret realm where Tatanah and Animah (they're sisters!) originally came from.

The Metabaron and John agree to this, instead of continuing their murder streak to get rid of Wolfhead and Tatanah, as smart people would have done. All head deep into the earth, where they find...another cliffhanger! Come back in the third incal book to find out what happens!

It's all a lot, and it's difficult for anyone with a normal level of intellect to take it seriously. The Mœbius art is supple, energetic, and great at story-telling, so my working theory - everybody fell in love with this back before it was translated, so they don't care about the words anyway - is still intact. Or maybe there are a substantial number of people who find Jodorowsky bafflegab compelling: remember how dumb the average person is, and that half of humanity is stupider than that.

This is a silly space opera that thinks it's profound. It gets much more fake-profound as it goes, and, as I recall, that pretense gets much more annoying. Let's see how I take it this time through.

The Thin Man by Dashiell Hammett

This was more hard-boiled than I expected - though not quite as hard-boiled as Hammett's earlier novels. (See my various posts on his other four books, from earlier this year.)

The Thin Man was Hammett's fifth and final novel, coming at the beginning of 1934 and launching the famous film series later the same year. It's narrated by former private detective Nick Charles, who now spends his time managing his rich wife Nora's affairs...and drinking far too much. (Even given that it's set during Prohibition, and the drinking culture of the '30s, I'm pretty sure Hammett meant his readers to realize Nick is an alcoholic - or whatever word they would have used in 1934, probably "drunk.")

Nick and Nora live in San Francisco, but are in New York for the end-of-the-year holidays - as Nick says in passing late in the book, to get away from Nora's relatives, who are annoying that time of year.

He meets Dorothy, the now-adult (but barely so) daughter of a former client, Clyde Winant, who asks him to help her get in touch with her estranged father. Nick replies that he's not in the PI business anymore, but gets caught up in the case anyway, as he's also contacted by Wynant's lawyer Herbert Maculay, Nick's army buddy from the Great War, and learns from the police that the reclusive Wynant's secretary, Julia Wolf, was murdered two days after he talked to Dorothy.

Events circle around the missing Wynant - an inventor who gave up his lab a few months ago to go do something unspecified, and has only been communicating through Macaulay since then - and his ex-wife, Dorothy's mother Mimi Jorgenson (remarried to a gigolo named Christian, though the money she got from Wynant is about to run out).

Nick keeps insisting he's not investigating anything, but keeps talking to Lieutenant Guild, who is looking into Julia's murder, and shares theories and ideas with Guild. He also keeps talking to all of the major characters - I skipped a few above; there are also some gangsters and a speakeasy owner, plus some minor-character drinking buddies who turn up repeatedly but don't have much to do with the actual murder or investigation.

Well, I should be fair: Nick mostly spends the book drinking, and he's talking with the people who are where he's drinking - speakeasies and their homes. And several of the principals of this case - Dorothy and Mimi and Maculay in particular - keep urging him to solve it.

And, in the end, he does, not entirely to the satisfaction of all of those people (hint hint). There is the usual "I guess you're wondering why I called you all here" scene, and the murderer - who actually killed three people, as Nick details - is carted off by Guild to face justice.

It's an amusing novel, though it does still shade a bit to the hardboiled side, with its gangsters and speakeasies and moral decay, than to a more frivolous drawing-room mystery, like the popular conception of the movie series. (I don't think I've seen any of the movies, so don't count on me for any specific genre-typing there.) Nick does drink a hell of a lot, which is a bit disconcerting, but Hammett clearly meant it to be, which makes it an element of the novel rather than just a bit of the culture at the time.

All in all, if you want to read a Hammett novel, my recommendation would be the first or the last: Red Harvest is still one of the great foundational hardboiled novels, and this one is fun and lively and somewhat lighter in tone. If you want more than that, the Library of America volume Complete Novels includes, as its title implies, all five of them.

George Sand: True Genius, True Woman by Séverine Vidal and Kim Consigny

Most lives don't have a specific story. People do things, they live and die, and it doesn't form any particular shape. Famous people are more likely to have stronger story elements - there's at least a rise, possibly a fall, probably phases or eras - but that only means better raw materials for a biographer.

So if I say that George Sand: True Genius, True Woman tells an "and then this happened" version of the famous 19th century novelist's life, I'm mostly just saying that George Sand had a normal kind of life. Things happened, she did her work, she was involved in causes and had love affairs, and then she died. That's the story writer Séverine Vidal and artist Kim Consigny tell here: one woman's life, from fairly early childhood to the moment of her death, in some detail. Vidal focuses somewhat on Sand's writing, but more so on her relationships - with her mother and grandmother in youth, with other family members and the men she was involved with later in life.

And I appreciate that. Some biographies, especially in graphic-novel form, find a story in their subject's lives by focusing on a moment or a period on the person's life. That's certainly valid, but, especially in a case where I don't know the person's life all that well - as here - I'd really prefer to get the full sweep of the story. And George Sand does just that.

She was born Amantine Lucile Aurore Dupin, daughter of what seems to be a minor noble in the very early 19th century, and the Napoleonic Wars somewhat impinged on that childhood - spent primarily at the family estate in Nohant in central France - but the drama of her early life was more centered on the conflict between her aristocratic paternal grandmother and her Parisian mother after the death of Aurore's father at a young age.

Vidal and Consigny show young Aurore as strong-willed, rebellious, prone to visions, and often unhappy with her role as a young aristocratic woman. (As seen later in life, she was against both the roles of "woman" and "aristocrat" as they existed in France at the time.)

She grew up, she started to write, she had affairs - but, before most of that, she did what women in her time had to do: she got married, at the age of eighteen. It was not a success, and maybe that lack of success led to some of the rest.

This is a fairly long graphic novel, over three hundred pages, and it's packed with details from all of Sand's life - again, more skewed to her personal life than to details of the themes and reactions to her works, though we do see her talk about and work on her major books here.

There's a lot of text, particularly dialogue. I assume a lot of it is taken from Sand's own extensive memoirs, or third-party accounts - I don't know if we can entirely trust any detailed account of a conversation before sound recording, but Sand's life was well-documented. Consigny brings a lose, breezy, amiable, energetic line to the proceedings, giving a lot of life to a story of people mostly in rooms talking to each other.

I've never read Sand, and knew very little about her life or work before this book. So I'll say it's a fine introduction, and a strong portrait of an interesting, influential figure who lived through tumultuous times and was close to a lot of other cultural figures of her day.

Better Things: American Girl

"Better Things" is a series of weekly posts, each about one song I really love, by an artist I haven't featured in the previous This Year or Portions For Foxes series. See the introduction for more.

And this week I'm back to one of the obvious ones. This is a song, and an artist, that I tried to fit into the This Year series, but it just didn't go.

(This song was from 1976, and the other 1976 songs that I couldn't make fit were the transcendent live version of Richard and Linda Thompson's Calvary Cross and the inimitable Dirty Deeds Done Dirt Cheap. As it was, the song I had for that year was the Eagles' The Last Resort, a song that's much more personally important to me.)

But Better Things is not tied to the calendar, and can celebrate great songs wherever they fell. So, this week, it's Tom Petty and the Heartbreakers with what I think was their first world-class song, American Girl. (You could make an argument for Breakdown, which is earlier on the same record and was released as a single earlier. But I think American Girl is bigger, stronger, longer-lasting, more iconic.)

As usual with my favorites, it's not a happy song.

God it's so painful
Something that's so close
And still so far out of reach

The urban legend is not true: it's not about a suicide. We can assume from that, from what Petty said about the song, that she got through this - the sad, depressive, hopeless moment catalogued in the song - and went on with her life.

And that's one of the things this song is about - going on, continuing, even after heartbreak.

Oh yeah, all right
Take it easy baby
Make it last all night
She was an American girl

Maybe the way to take that "was" isn't to think of her as gone. Maybe she's just less innocent, more battered by life, wiser, older. Maybe what's gone is the "girl."