A varied month.
50. Twenty-Seventh City, by Jonathan Franzen
(Picador , 1988, 2001)
To backtrack, I really liked The Corrections, and thought The Discomfort Zone was pretty good, but I felt like I kept waiting for Twenty-Seventh City to make sense.
At its most bare, it’s the story of a conspiracy by a group of people to destroy a family in order to take financial and political control of a city, ranked twenty-seventh in America. But while individual threads sometimes work, as a whole it fails to come together.
Through the entire novel I kept waiting for Franzen to bring it all around, but to skirt actually resolving plot points, he just kills off characters and then the book stops. Not ends, stops.
Kinda disappointing.
51. Kiki de Montparnasse, by José-Louis Bocquet and Catel Muller
(SelfMadeHero, 2007, 2012)
Kim kindly invited me to TCAF, the Toronto Comics Art Festival, and it was my first time attending. I’ll definitely be attending next year. It’s a free festival held at the Toronto Reference Library with an overwhelming number of small and indie comic presses from around the world, as well as artists, writers – with comics, art and other merchandise available for purchase.
It was there that I can across this gorgeous book. Catel Muller and José-Louis Bocquet were there, illustrating and signing copies purchased. It’s beautifully made, and captures a fascinating woman I’d not heard about previously, Kiki de Montparnasse, nee Alice Prin. It captures the rich life of Paris in the twenties among artists. Continue reading »
