Bryan Talbot

A truly remarkable and beautiful book about a remarkable and beautiful soul.

I have become a bit obsessed with Leonara Carrington since reading The Hearing Trumpet and falling in love with her art and writing, and this absolutely blew me away.

I don't know enough about her life to know how true an account of her life this is, but it makes sense with the things I have come across.

Her life truly was a magical, brutal, heartbreaking gauntlet and this graphic novel captures it and her art spectacularly!

I absolutely hated The Last Days of New Paris for using Surrealism without engaging with or understanding it. In contrast, while the narrative is a rather traditional biography, the use of Carrington and others Surrealist Imagery and style to. convey emotion and the strangeness of her life is pretty much perfect!

Genuinely made me incredibly happy and absolutely made me cry. Wonderful stuff!… (meer)

Everso slightly underwhelmed. I liked the style of the book, and Talbot's art is, as ever, frequently beautiful (though I'm less keen on his more cartoony, flat-colour style, than the softer, textured art that thankfully dominates the book). I also enjoyed the little notes from Mary Talbot, where Bryan's art differed from her memories. They made the book feel more of a living document. Unfortunately those tailed off later in the book, presumably because Mary and Bryan improved their communication.

The story interleaves Mary's life and her memories of her father, a James Joyce scholar, and that of Joyce's own daughter Lucia. Both threads were okay, but neither were strong enough as written to carry the book on their own. And neither particularly added anything to the other. So they just ended up propping each other up. Also Lucia's story comes to dominate the book, which is reasonable, but leaves the book feeling a little lopsided. Unfortunately it felt like two disjunct sequences of events, rather than a well-crafted narrative.

Part of the problem is that this feels like an ambitious book, but the execution didn't live up to my expectation. I normally don't mind when a book over-reaches, and can't quite pull things together. Unfortunately, in this case I felt that it under-reached.
… (meer)