Craig Thompson's Habibi (2011)
[Acquired: Saturday, February 9, 2013]:Thompson, Craig. Habibi. Pantheon Books. New York: Random House, Inc., 2011.
Bronwyn and I went into town yesterday to go to Renee Bevan's artist talk for her new show "Stream of Thoughts" at the Gus Fisher Gallery. I thoroughly recommend it - contemporary jewellery as conceptual art. For me (at least) a real revelation:
After a nice chat with Renee and curator Karl Chitham, we wandered off afterwards to check out Real Groovy Records, which I hadn't visited for years. It still seems to be going strong: lots of hipsters, vinyl, but also an immensely quirky selection of books and DVDs.
There I saw this book: Habibi, by Craig Thompson, author of Blankets (2004). Now, I know that a lot of comics-fans thought that Blankets was overpraised, but I really enjoyed it myself. Perhaps it's being brought up a fundamentalist Christian that makes me feel a certain kinship with Thompson and his bitter-sweet account of childhood and first love. For me it reads as an intensely emotional story rather than a sentimental one, but I accept that there's a thin line between the two. Perhaps the distinction will always be a subjective one.
I was very pleased to hear that he was moving into Islamic themes with his next major book. Thompson has caught the intoxication of Arabic script, and the beauty of some of his line drawings beggars belief. As a life-long Arabian Nights obsessive, too, his choice of a Scheherazade-like narrator for a long intertwined tale of love and violence was never going to be a hard sell for me (although I see it has been critiqued by some for exhibiting "self-conscious Orientalism"; possibly so - but I think it's important to respect the author's genre intentions here. After all, the same could easily be said of various of Salman Rushdie's novels and - especially - his two children's books).
I was in two minds about simply going home and ordering it online, but there it was, in the flesh, in the shop, and Bronwyn reminded me that our beautiful local bookshops will simply cease to exist if we don't buy from them. So I did. and here it is.
It reminds me a little of walking through the streets of Kochi, in India, and hearing the muezzin from a local mosque, and feeling a sensation of pure joy at the beauty of the sound: the profound aesthetic harmony of architecture, music, and the moment, all together at once ...
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- category - Comics & Graphic Novels: Cartoons & Graphic Novels (English)
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