Berlin

Yay for not having to go to the store to buy the book this time! This one has such a snazzy cover, too. Not that the other books that we've read didn't--I just think this one happens to be extra neat.

And I guess the actual inside of Berlin is pretty neat, too. At this point in the class, I'm noticing all of (well, at least more of) the artistic techniques that define great graphic novels: unique scene transitions, unorthodox panel sizes/shapes, panoramic full-page panels that depict one continuous scene, etc... And it just seems like the stories keep getting more and more complicated, too. Blankets was very straightforward and easy to follow from a narrative perspective. Stuck Rubber Baby was slightly more complicated because of its ensemble cast and occasional time-traveling. Fun Home, though not hard to follow, per se, made even more liberal use of non-sequential or chronological story telling. Each chapter was more of a self-contained unit--one isolated aspect of the author's story of her life. It got to the point where I had to question whether or not the whole thing formed a cohesive story, or rather just a loose collection of thoughts and after-the-fact reflections on incidents in her life delivered in a stream-of-consciousness fashion.

And that brings us up to Berlin. I may have said this before about an earlier work, but I really do not know what the hell is going on yet in this book, and I'm halfway done with it! There are so many characters and so many different intertwining plotlines that I can't keep track of it all. I can appreciate that the "messiness" of the narrative runs parallel to the themes of chaos and turmoil that are prevalent in the city at the time, but it sure doesn't make for an easy read. I suppose I still have a rather typical narrative bias--I want to see a main character, a conflict, some rising action, a climax, and a resolution that ties things up for the reader. I've really yet to learn my lesson that most of the graphic novels we've looked at thus far have defied at least some of those basic story telling conventions. In a sense, it's all still there in Berlin: the main character is the city itself, the conflict is comprised of all of the bickering factions within its walls that are vying for political advantage, and the rising action consists of all of the little individual episodes of aggression and intolerance of others' ideas that happen on a daily basis. We haven't seen a climax yet, but I'm going to put faith in the story that there is some larger point that all of these individual stories connect to.