Body Music by David Homel

Abstract

she seeds the narrative with deep and abiding interest. Manhattan Beach is a novel to savor. Rita D. Jacobs New York Julie Maroh. Body Music. Trans. David Homel. Vancouver. Arsenal Pulp Press. 2017. 300 pages. With an orchestra of players on the stage of the streets of Montreal, Julie Maroh conducts a symphony of the human condition in Body Music. Through twenty-one graphic-narrative vignettes, Maroh guides us through a stunning array of emotions as she chronicles the lives and relationships of people across the city. With few exceptions, each vignette is unique in the players it presents , giving a specific movement of discrete instruments, like a separate movement for each flavor of love. As such, each treats its subject matter the way we experience love for the first time. Some notes are strange, some sweet, comforting, others dark, discordant , and also propulsive. Maroh runs us through all different kinds of love: puppy love, lust for sex, the feeling of losing your most cherished companion to debilitating disease, to missed love and ships passing in the night. No form is off the score. So too are the players diverse. Maroh’s artwork is also harmonious. Beautiful, fluid, and impressionistic at times, the art brings the song of the work to life, depicting all the glory of love. At times it changes slightly to fit the differing themes of the vignette. In one vignette, her art takes on a darker, more abstract appearance in a story dealing with love as interpreted through First Nations’ folk culture . In another, the art bears a more realistic , harder edge during one of the silent sequences, telling the story fully through the art. The art also represents a hidden love, Montreal itself. D. Emerson Eddy Hamilton, Ontario Roland Buti. Year of the Drought. Trans. Charlotte Mandell. London. Old Street. 2017. 160 pages. Thirteen-year-old Auguste (Gus) Sutter vividly remembers the summer of 1976, not just for the preternaturally harsh drought but also for the incidents leading up to the disintegration of his family. Gus, his mother and father, his older sister, Lea, and a mentally challenged worker named Rudy live on the family’s farm on the Swiss plateau. Buti’s take on a coming-of-age story is captivating because of the impending sense of doom and ruin that he weaves throughout Gus’s narrative. All of nature around them foreshadows the sad fate of this family: the crops are burning in the sun, Nota Bene WORLDLIT.ORG 73 Lawrence Joseph So Where Are We? Farrar, Straus and Giroux A New York–based writer and law professor of Syrian and Lebanese descent, Lawrence Joseph writes the noise and smoke and digital crowds of a world perplexed and then pierces that world with beams of lucid affect. Grappling with events of great scope, the poems in So Where Are We? are deeply affected by the events since 9/11, which they explore with an unflinching gaze and critical intelligence. Michael Köhlmeier Yiza Trans. Ruth Martin Haus Publishing Originally written in German by an Austrian author, Yiza is a story about a young girl of the same name who is abandoned in Germany, where she meets two young boys in a shelter for migrant children. One day, they decide to run away. Köhlmeier writes in a simple language and structure that suits the subjects and contrasts well with the gravity of the reality around them. ...