Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama
2013; University of Oklahoma; Volume: 87; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.1353/wlt.2013.0203
ISSN1945-8134
Autores Tópico(s)Themes in Literature Analysis
Resumo74 World Literature Today reviews in which all titles are cited, an alphabetical list of all selections, as well as an alphabetical index to the first line of every selection. Additionally, there’s also an index to the material included on the CD. And last but not least, there’s a helpful biographical and critical overview of the life and work of the poet. All of which makes this volume a worthy addition to any institutional or personal library of Frisian literature. Henry J. Baron Calvin College Miscellaneous Alison Bechdel. Are You My Mother? A Comic Drama. Boston. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt. 2012. isbn 9780618982509 Alison Bechdel made an auspicious entrance on the literary scene with her first graphic memoir, Fun Home: A Family Tragic Comic, in which she excavates her relationship with her father. That remarkable work was filled with literary allusions (her father was a high school English teacher) and revelations about the family dynamic. In this new graphic memoir, Bechdel spends most of the book exploring her relationship with her mother and a variety of female lovers and female therapists. Sadly, for the reader, the motherdaughter relationship is not as engaging as the father-daughter interaction was in the earlier work. In addition, Bechdel’s use of other literary and psychoanalytic works is less wide ranging here and doesn’t have the resonant quality so remarkable inFunHome.She is drawn mainly to the work of British psychoanalyst Donald Winnicott and to Alice Miller’s Drama of the Gifted Child, and there are many scenes here with Alison in therapy with a variety of therapists. Her statement to one of them about her inability to write unless she gets her mother out of her head and the concomitant admission that the only way to get her out of her head is to write the book, presents the Catch-22 and raison d’être of this work. Bechdel and her character Alison are also steeped in the literature of both feminist theory and liberation; in fact, when she alludes to Virginia Woolf or Adrienne Rich, or explores her need for creating art, this novel achieves some of the power of her earlier work. But all too often she gets mired in the working through of her life against Winnicott’s theories, and this adherence to explanation stalls the work’s power. At times it comes close to reading like a graduate thesis about object relations, Winnicott ’s field. Bechdel has great skill in depicting characters, both graphically and through language, and she makes artistic leaps that are at times breathtaking . Her creative use of graphic chiaroscuro and her deft use of panels of varying dimensions engages the reader with the text and entices one to jump across gutters to create what Rosamund Stanford The Hurricurrent Deep South “An untidying soundless tide”—these are the defining words of the title poem and a summary of the forces at work throughout The Hurricurrent. From life on a South African farm to the dizzying pace of the twenty-first century, Rosamund Stanford’s poems resonate with a vibrant and wellhoned intelligence. Anna María Shua The Weight of Temptation Andrea G. Labinger, tr. University of Nebraska Press Marina Rubin, tired of endlessly unsuccessful dieting, checks herself in to an expensive “fat farm.” She gets much more than she bargained for—something closer to The Lord of the Flies than a spa experience. Argentine writer Anna María Shua explores both the dark and light sides of human nature in this fascinating story. Nota Bene january– february 2013 • 75 Scott McCloud, in Understanding Comics , refers to as “closure.” In other words, there are many delights here, but this graphic memoir fails as a truly coherent work because of what feels, at times, like intrusive pedantry. Rita D. Jacobs Montclair State University Roberto Bolaño. The Secret of Evil. Chris Andrews & Natasha Wimmer, tr. New York. New Directions. 2012. isbn 9780811218153 At first glance, Roberto Bolaño’s The Secret of Evil may read like a hastily assembled collection of fiction, essays, and minor reflections from an author whose posthumous reputation would be the envy of any writer . But this is not the case. Gathered...
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