insane nightmare fever dream. multigenerational occultist power struggle tragedy. argentinian gothic. so evocative of place and time. really beautiful and truly scary in a lingering way I rarely find horror novels to be - thinking about omaira’s head and pablo’s hand as I walk down the hall in the dark. a book you have to lie down after finishing. 

slow, reflective queer slice of life. beautiful art and a comic format I really enjoyed - a mix of paragraphs of text + static images, sometimes more like manuscript illuminations + sequential panel comics. 

this book is emotionally dense without feeling heavy - the characters grapple with trauma, witnessing atrocities, struggles with family, deep seated beliefs about themselves and the world, but it never feels melodramatic or heavy handed or like it’s trying to shock you. this was actually kind of a great companion to read right after Sea of Tranquility because both books hit on this theme I love and have been thinking about: insane terrible things happen to you and you keep going because that’s life, and even in the aftermath of this thing life is still good in these little ways. 

I think… not many people are good at writing about grief and trauma, either because they haven’t experienced it and fetishize it, they assume their reader hasn’t experienced THIS trauma, or because they’re writing about something so raw it feels like it’s just happened. The Short While is not that - it withholds showing you the traumatic incident itself for a long time, hops around in time, shows you the characters and their responses instead, and then just kind of lets the clock roll forward as things change. there’s no raw sensationalism around the event itself because it’s clear that it marked the characters and changed their relationship with one another. those changes are what’s interesting, not the details of the precipitating event. it’s what makes the world around the characters work as well - the precise history and mechanisms of the oppressive regime the characters live and have lived under aren’t necessary to explain in detail (tho that said I do love an ursula k leguin ass dystopic utopia/utopic dystopia). what’s interesting is how living in that world has affected the characters, their families, their communities… 

anyways I’m losing my train of thought but this was a great comic. and it took me like 3 days to read! put more paragraphs in comics!!!

the last 100 pages of this book made me cry like a little bitch!!! 

at its core is the same thing I loved about Station Eleven:

a life lived in a simulation, apocalypse, pandemic is still a life. things happen and you can never go home and the world you knew doesn’t exist anymore. and life goes on and you live it and it’s lovely and sad and stupid and funny.

could draw comparisons to Cloud Atlas and The Bone Clocks by David Mitchell but obviously much shorter/less dense than either of those novels. I’m a sucker for non-linear/long timeline stories with an interconnected cast like that. felt like you did get to know the characters here and their emotional landscapes, even if some of them only get a little time onscreen. 

beautiful art. love to read about Lesbians With Problems.

echhhh. this book was making me cranky so I stopped reading itZ very slow. all of the narrators speak and write almost exactly alike. there are like 4 or 5 of them. none are particularly likeable.

setting is unfortunately flat as well. interwar europe was like such a fascinating lively time and place but this falls flat - most of the characters are artists (or friends/muses/patrons of artists) living and working in paris c. 1920, but you don’t really get an evocative sense of the city and the scene and the philosophy and the politics that should be surrounding them… the characters are strangely uninfluenced by the world around them, except for the central non-narrator character, who seems to have little agency as she’s unwittingly moulded into a nazi collaborator. instead you get these sniffy little references that are immediately explained because the author doesn’t trust her reader to know what she’s talking about. there’s a bit where a character, writing in a private diary entry, references “madchen in uniform” when describing the appearance of someone… and then immediately explains that it’s “a lesbian movie very popular right now” …!!!! why would she explain this to her own diary? why should the author explain an iconic film to her readers??? the whole book is written like this. I found this eventually made it sort of unreadable.

this book is too mired in liberalism to really reckon with the question at its core - why are people drawn into fascism? the central character, Lou Villars (based on real life evil gnc lesbian athlete Violette Morris) doesn’t do much deliberately to become a fascist. she’s framed as a victim of circumstance. her upbringing and the few opportunities she has to do what she loves and follow her passions just *happen* to land her in the path of nationalists, antisemites, and xenophobes who profoundly influence her worldview. this seems very at odds with the portrayal of Lou as a person with a strong innate personality that goes against social expectations. does she have autonomy or not, yknow??? maybe the book gets into this later but it really didn’t feel like the author was equipped to deal with the fact that someone might *choose* fascism (rather than simply be led astray), let alone *why* they would do that. 

also. I don’t want to get into it but generally the way queer people are handled in this book feels so weird. like at best I’ll chalk it up to a straight ally author simply not understanding the vibes. at worst it’s like quirky homophobia. I don’t care to explain! iykyk

anyways go read about Violette Morris instead if you need a morally corrupt lesbian fix. the real person is far more interesting than the character in this book (Morris was older at the time of WWII - she had already driven ambulances in WWI and then had an amateur sports career before aiding the Vichy regime) and can probably offer you more insight into how fascism takes hold of those you wouldn’t expect it to. 

deforge is a cartoonist who really uses the medium. visuals are always beautiful and strange, the writing is like a perfect mix of absurdity, accurate observation, terrible sadness, & utopian hope perhaps on the same level as ursula k leguin. his panels have a really excellent sense of rhythm to them. “album” is my favourite comic in this collection. I will probably always have a soft spot in my heart for stories that handle grief/death like this…