Other Voices, Other Worlds

by Jeff Jackson

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Picture by The Cardboard Valise

January 3, 2012

If you’re looking to lose yourself in a fictional world, these books are guaranteed to open up vistas that you couldn’t previously imagine. There’s a fantastical travelogue in the form a comic strip; an illustrated essay about Atlantic eels and Indian astronomy; a Japanese manga involving a mechanized garden; and a proto-surrealist novel about intricate African pageants. But these works do more than just create their own realms, they also immerse readers in a unique literary sensibility. Their author’s voices and storytelling methods can’t be mistaken for anybody else. 

To help readers better imagine their unusual settings, these books often employ visuals such as treated photographs, pen-and-ink sketches, and precisely rendered geometric diagrams. Interestingly, none of them fit comfortably into the category of graphic novels. They’re true hybrid works, exquisitely designed literary objects which contain entire universes that exist only in the pages you hold between your own two hands. 

FROM THE OBSERVATORY

by Julio Cortazar (Archipelago Books) 

Although he was one of the 20^th Century’s most acclaimed novelists and short story writers, a surprising number of Julio Cortazar’s works have never been translated into English. Fortunately, the folks at Archipelago Books have started to correct this oversight. In recent years, they’ve released some of his unclassifiable efforts which blur the line between fiction and non-fiction. In 2009, they published the charming travelogue, Autonauts of the Cosmoroute, a month-long exploration of all the highway rest stops between Paris and Marseilles. Now they’ve issued From the Observatory, another gem that’s equal parts scientific essay and prose poem.   

A sort of ecstatic reverie, the book unfurls an associative flow of images that starts in modern-day Paris and moves across time and space. Its main preoccupation is the life cycle of the Atlantic eel, which covers thousands of miles as part of its elaborate spawning ritual. The text is interspersed with luminous photographs of the Jaipur astronomical observatory, built in the 18^th Century by an Indian sultan. Cortazar evokes these strange and magisterial structures as examples of how science can artfully reflect the deep mysteries of existence. 

As always, he manages to stitch together his disparate themes and digressions into a cohesive whole. The moving final pages of From the Observatory make a compelling case that science, politics, and metaphysics – disciplines that often eye each other with suspicion - are inextricably intertwined.  

THE CARDBOARD VALISE

by Ben Katchor (Pantheon Books)

Ben Katchor is best known for his long-running serial Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer, which The New Yorker called “the last great American comic strip.” Fans of traditional comics often find themselves befuddled by Katchor’s subtle humor and idiosyncratic stories, but his reputation looms large in literary circles. Pulitzer Prize winning novelist Michael Chabon describes his work as a mix of Jorge Luis Borges, Edward Hopper, and Giorgio de Chirico. Critic Lawrence Weschler compares his achievements to Proust. And, Katchor is one of the only cartoonists to have won a prestigious MacArthur “Genius” Grant.

After a long absence, Katchor has finally returned to print with The Cardboard Valise. This imaginary travelogue is more fantastical than Julius Knipl but it’s cut from the same cloth. The book generates a rich comic tension in the subtle disconnect between the words and the images. The Cardboard Valise also continues Katchor’s specialty of striking off-key emotional notes that you have to train yourself to fully register. It’s filled with an ever-shifting combination of dry humor, whimsical absurdity, and piercing melancholy. 

The Cardboard Valise’s story revolves around the exotic regions of Outer Canthus and its ancient restroom ruins, pamphlets detailing their ankle sock culture, and native language that contains such unusual terms as “sapajuliast” (a monkey with a technical skill) and “aeturnapy” (a frozen hamburger which is never to be defrosted). It also features exiled kings, a man who’s been married 47 times, and a gift shop dedicated to a deceased child.

The book see-saws between stand-alone segments and continuous story lines, but it’s always concerned with unlocking the narratives embedded in the cultural ephemera that surrounds us. Its strangely familiar world should please both newcomers as well as Katchor’s growing cult. 

GARDEN

by Yuichi Yokoyama (PictureBox)

You don’t often think of manga as fine art, but the work of Yuichi Yokoyama breaks the mold. The Japanese cartoonist’s work has been displayed in museums around the world, including the Pompidou Center in Paris. It’s fitting his books are released in the U.S. by PictureBox, a publisher whose consistently exciting offerings explore the intersection between fine art and graphic novels. His two previous efforts – New Engineering and Travel - might be classified as something like structuralist architectural manga. They’re maniacally detailed and beautifully drafted pieces about unusual buildings, nature scenes, and trains whose narratives have been purposefully scrubbed of most human content. There are also occasional fight scenes, but even those scenes have been transformed into sublime formal exercises. 

Yokoyama’s third book, Garden, is his best and most accessible to date. It involves a group of people who sneak inside a gigantic, walled garden. They discover a sprawling landscape of elaborate machines, shifting pathways, movable houses, labyrinthine libraries, hills made of photographs, rivers of floating metal objects, and much more. Each page reveals one architectural marvel after another. 

Where his previous work was largely wordless, Yokoyama has added snippets of dialogue along the lines of “Something strange is floating toward us” and “Let’s go up the cloth stairs.” This unobtrusive language adds clarity without puncturing the work’s wonderfully inhuman qualities or breaking the spell cast by his theme park of intoxicating wonders.

IMPRESSIONS OF AFRICA

by Raymond Roussel (Dalkey Archive Press) 

More than any of the other books in this column, Raymond Roussel’s fiction is an acquired taste. But once you’re tuned to his frequency, he can deliver as much pleasure as any bestseller. Although dismissed in his lifetime, his work has become a wellspring of inspiration for numerous important writers and artists, including Salvador Dali, Andre Gide, John Ashbery, Michel Foucault, and Italo Calvino. Surrealist Louis Aragon dubbed  him the “President of the Republic of Dreams.” Over a hundred years after its initial publication, his writing remains as startling and innovative as ever. 

Roussel has remained a fringe figure here partly because the weird charms of his French prose have been notoriously difficult to translate. Dalkey Archive Press’s new translation of his first novel, Impressions of Africa, by Mark Polizzotti, should fix that. It’s a huge advance over the previous version –  at once sharper, stranger, and clearer. In the first half of the novel, Roussel’s terse sentences describe a series of outlandish pageants and performances that have been organized by an African king. These include intricate games played solely by cats, a mechanical orchestra that runs on fluids, a giant worm that plays Hungarian melodies on a zither, and a demonstration of magnets strong enough to attract ships crossing the Atlantic. The second half of the novel matter-of-factly explains the surprisingly logical stories behind each spectacle, adding yet more layers of complication and intrigue to the story.

Raymond Roussel’s shadow hangs over all the authors in this column. His book may be the only one here without visuals, but his strange visions are so vivid that any illustrations would be redundant.