a great graphic novel beautiful and touching

[Adam Blatner]

Book Report: (This is a GREAT book--moving, stunning art, and on and on.)
 Tan, Shaun. The Arrival. (A summary: In this wordless graphic novel, a man leaves his homeland and sets off for a new country, where he must build a new life for himself. Then he sends for his family and they arrive. ISBN 13: 978-0-439-89529-3.) October, 2007. New York: Arthur A. Levine Books / Scholastic, Inc. in conjunction with Lothian Books of Melbourne, Australia. (I think the author lives in Perth, Western Australia.     http://www.det.wa.edu.au/education/cmis/eval/fiction/authors/at20.htm#tan     )

      About 10 x 13" and 1 inch thick, with a cover that looks a bit like an old suitcase, and done in a sepia tone that suggests the old photos taken by our great- grandparents, Shaun Tan (what kind of Irish - Chinese or whatever kind of name is that?   http://www.shauntan.net/about.html  ) has executed a work of art that combines a bit of surrealism and symbolic realism to suggest the sheer sense of foreign-ness that my parents and grandparents and their relatives must have gone through as they emigrated from the horrors and persecutions of Eastern Europe a century ago and come to "der golden medina," Yiddish for the Golden Land. The author ingeniously presents so many of the elements that we forget must be staggeringly weird to newcomers, from our writing system/alphabet, strange language, complex maps (that they came through Ellis Island into Manhattan or greater New York---such a big, confusing place!), astonishing architecture, strange species of animals, odd, unfamiliar foods, and so forth--- all are fascinatingly illustrated. Many times during the "reading"---no words, note, only vivid and evocative drawings---I found myself tearing up, weeping, it so touched my heart.        

Adam Blatner, M.D.
   website: www.blatner.com/adam/   
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://grouptalkweb.org/pipermail/list_grouptalkweb.org/attachments/20080620/7e55a328/attachment.html