I read
Asterios Polyp by David Mazzucchelli less than 36 hours ago, and already, I'm telling anyone who will listen about it. I even blurted out "This book is so incredible!" to a couple who was merely passing by the graphic novel section on their way out of the store. Part of why I can't contain myself is that I want so badly to talk with someone about it. I need to read it again.
I need to own it. So do you.
Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review which illuminates many of the reasons that I think it's brilliant: "...a huge, knotty marvel, the comics equivalent of a Pynchon or Gaddis novel... Asterios Polyp, its arrogant, prickly protagonist, is an award-winning architect who's never built an actual building, and a pedant in the midst of a spiritual crisis. After the structure of his own life falls apart, he runs away to try to rebuild it into something new. There are fascinating digressions on aesthetic philosophy, as well as some very broad satire, but the core of the book is Mazzucchelli's odyssey of style -— every major character in the book is associated with a specific drawing style and visual motifs, and the design, color scheme and formal techniques of every page change to reinforce whatever's happening in the story..."
Full Review (scroll down to about 80%)Here's what I wrote on
Goodreads: "This is one of those books that makes you marvel at the possibilities of the graphic medium, and of books in general. Often, when I read graphic novels, they feel like short stories, and not simply because you can read one in an evening. But this one feels like a novel, a really well-written novel, with character development and motifs and memories and so many great layers of complexity. It is visually stunning, and so much of the mood/emotion is conveyed simply by the images and colors and line quality. This book does many things that a great novel does, and several things that a purely verbal novel cannot do. And I say BOOK over and over again because you cannot possibly have an experience like this in a digital format."
(continued after the jump)
And here's the segue: I realized that this kind of pleasure will never be had with a Kindle, a Sony Reader, or any other sort of digital reading device. Technologically, they can't do it, and even if they could do color, it wouldn't be the same. This is why I don't fear the death of the book. And this is why I think that publishers who are going gaga over digitizing everything are taking the wrong approach.
Bear with me here. I think that it is absolutely right that we talk about comics as a
medium, as
Scott McCloud and others have taught us to. But why aren't we thinking about digital in the same way, as a medium, rather than a format? Reading
Asterios Polyp reminded me that the graphic medium can accomplish things in a novel that the written word cannot. Similarly, I'm sure that the digital medium could accomplish things in a novel that graphics or the written word could not, and THAT is where its innovation and interest lies for me. Not in its ability to replicate exactly what I might get in a book. And yet, that seems to be what developers of devices and digital formats are striving for at this point. They have yet to examine its possibilities
as a medium.
To me, a Kindle or an eReader is a content storage device, not a book. It is mighty convenient for people who travel a lot or who have too many books or who deal in manuscripts on a regular basis. Forgot a book? Whip out your iPhone, it's so easy! But
Asterios Polyp could not exist on any of these devices, and a child will never gleefully unwrap several of these devices at a birthday party, and rarely will someone have occasion to scan your device and glean something about your character. Devices are convenient, but they are not the be-all and end-all. Don't scrap your printing budgets just yet.
