Monday, March 11, 2013
Mother's Urn: Memoir Dust
This graphic memoir demands to be reread and reexamined. The illustrations are so damn intricate. I found it hard to focus on the pictures. Instead, I eventually had to pick a spot to concentrate on and then slowly let my eyes drift along the images in order to take it all in piece by piece, before even attempting to view the pages as wholes. As I neared the end of the book, the binding was increasingly coming undone, which I feel added to the sense of decay and brokenness of the story. Much like the mother daughter relationship that in the end is not sustainable, the hard copy of the book itself falls apart in the end. On page 43, phone lines and state lines divide the mother and daughter, meanwhile the pages of the book are being materially divided. Of course this is probably unintentional, but I found it poetic nonetheless.
I definitely appreciated the tendency towards Oubapo in Mother's Urn, which caused an emphasis to be placed on decoding (upon rereading the decoding does inherit an organic quality.) Oubapo in this way definitely privileges and respects the intelligence of the reader. The images were so imbued with emotion in such a tragic way, however, that once I was able to focus on them, I felt moved by them, and didn't necessarily have to rely on intelligence to garner the feelings they are meant to evoke. Perhaps this is because this memoir hit close to home. Kalamity J and Antonina Gribnikova nail that realization that drugs can diminish and ultimately evaporate the intensity of relationships- The numbing/ hollowing effect of drugs and the ability of drugs to divide and make strange is profoundly sad, but it's comforting to see that moment become universal in this book.
I liked that the book wasn't perfect. I liked that the font and font color were inconsistent and the images didn't match with regard to emphasis on color, medium, style, or composition. For an underground book to convey such an underground feeling, I think this almost needed to be the case. After having read Are You My Mother, which was so meticulous and drew attention to the way in which it was constructed just so, I appreciated the chaos of Mother's Urn. It felt genuine- less insistent on its success as a post-therapeutic book, and less wholeheartedly insistent on resolution, which more often resides with fiction and not reality.
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I really appreciate your impression of brokenness and decay with the undoing of the binding. Mine was destroyed before I finished reading the book the first time, and this reading makes something lovely out of something I first found to be annoying.
ReplyDeleteI also agree that this book demands to be reread. More of it unfolded for me today as I reread some of it while looking at other people's posts...there's so much here that it's impossible to catch it all the first time, or maybe even the first few times. The artwork, especially in the first section really is very busy, and I found I had to do the same thing, look at the images a bit at a time. Otherwise, they seemed to have nothing to do with the text, but I found it's in there. The artist is kind enough to give our eyes a rest here and there, too, by only sparsely illustrating the pages between the full-page images.
i'm so happy with this discussion. yes, it's an underground book and part of our discussion is what that means, as well. People are put off by chaos and inconsistencies--we like order and some predictability. I want to dive in with all you.
ReplyDeletee
'After having read Are You My Mother, which was so meticulous and drew attention to the way in which it was constructed just so, I appreciated the chaos of Mother's Urn. It felt genuine- less insistent on its success as a post-therapeutic book, and less wholeheartedly insistent on resolution, which more often resides with fiction and not reality.'
ReplyDeleteI really, really have to agree with you here. Although I loved "Are You My Mother?" I did not like the process/experience of reading the book. But "Mother's Urn" left a different and more haunting taste in my mouth. It was chaotic but also soothing in its chaos. Maybe, to me, it's because that's how I feel about my own mother. Chaos.