The Arrival, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian, Shortcomings

My picks from tomorrow’s Times’ Sunday Book Review with a bent for the other, miscellaneous and alternative. Hopefully this will be a recurring linkroll that I can keep up with each week. This week of November 11 (11/11!), I choose you, Pikachu! I mean, the Children’s Book section reviews of Shaun Tan’s “The Arrival” — graphic novel, a wordless, timeless meditation on “not an immigrant’s story, but the immigrant’s story,” and Sherman Alexie’s “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian”, his first young-adult title. Also Adrian Tomine’s “Shortcomings,” another graphic novel, about 30-year-old “anti-hero” Ben Tanaka, dealing with his career-driven girlfriend that leaves Cali for NY, a lesbian Korean graduate friend, sprinkled with his penchant for blondes. “The Arrival” has also been picked as one of the Times’ ten Best Illustrated Children’s Books of 2007. Link to slideshow gallery

And finally, despite all the other notable books written about in this weeks section including a Picasso biography, an elaborate Star Wars pop-up book, a new translation of Dante’s “Paradiso”… just for kicks… get ready for it… I would like to write about a book review I read today in the review section, of a book written about “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read”, and want you to keep in mind that I haven’t read the actual book, but rather only the book review. Translated from French, psychoanalyst and professor of lit Pierre Bayard gives reason and thought to why he “doesn’t blame us for fudging [about books we haven't read], and he doesn’t want us to blame ourselves.” He apparently says it’s okay!

Just one more reason I think a recap on books we haven’t read yet could become a nice record and incentive to do just that — read more.

All right. Now, choice quotes from each of the above New York times reviews after the jump, plus pretty books covers for you to judge by(!) And just how to talk about that book you haven’t read.

New York Times Online free registration may be required. Click the book covers below to see user reviews/buy online from Amazon.

• “The Arrival” by Shaun Tan – “By placing photorealistic human figures in abstract, surreal environments, Tan evokes the intimacy of an individual immigrant experience without ever settling on a specific person, time or place. [...] Inside [the book's pages], borderless sepia panels are arranged in careful grids. Creases and unidentifiable splotches elegantly blemish many of the pages. [...]
  The effect is mesmerizing. Reading “The Arrival” feels like paging through a family treasure newly discovered up in the attic.” – Gene Luen Yang, author of “American Born Chinese”
• “The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian” by Sherman Alexie, illustrated by Ellen Forney – “[...] is Alexie’s first foray into the young adult genre, and it took him only one book to master the form. Recently nominated for a National Book Award, this is a gem of a book. I keep flipping back to re-read the best scenes and linger over Ellen Forney’s cartoons. [...] For 15 years now, Sherman Alexie has explored the struggle to survive between the grinding plates of the Indian and white worlds. He’s done it through various characters and genres, but [this] may be his best work yet. Working in the voice of a 14-year-old forces Alexie to strip everything down to action and emotion, so that reading becomes more like listening to your smart, funny best friend recount his day while waiting after school for a ride home.” – Bruce Barcott, contributing editor at Outside magazine
• “Shortcomings” by Adrian Tomine – “Ben is a fascinating, maddening character, [...] Tomine takes voyeuristic delight in capturing every gruesome facial expression of a couple in midargument. The author is an expert at hooking the reader without tricks or obvious effort, and you’ll be tempted to buzz through “Shortcomings” in an hour. But you’ll want to slow down to take in the detailed black-and-white panels that casually document the way we live now. [...] his latest investigation into matters of the heart has gently led him to the stuff of more obvious social relevance. In its mood and its analysis of how male sexuality is tied up with ethnicity and social status, “Shortcomings” finds itself somewhere between “Goodbye, Columbus” and “Portnoy’s Complaint.” Eventually, Tomine may have his “American Pastoral.” – Jim Windolf, contributing editor at Vanity Fair
• “How to Talk About Books You Haven’t Read” by Pierre Bayard, translated by Jeffery Mehlman – “He proposes, and employs, a new set of scholarly abbreviations to go along with op. cit. and ibid.: UB: book unknown to me; SB: book I have skimmed; HB: book I have heard about; and FB: book I have forgotten. [...] After anatomizing the different types of nonreading, Bayard addresses the social implications in a section called “Literary Confrontations.” I commend his advice for meeting an author and being forced to say something about his or her new book: “Praise it without going into detail.” [...] Bayard finally reveals his diabolical intent: he claims that talking about books you haven’t read is “an authentic creative activity.” As a teacher of literature, he seems to believe that his ultimate goal is to encourage creativity. “All education,” he writes, “should strive to help those receiving it to gain enough freedom in relation to works of art to themselves become writers and artists.” – Jay McInerney, author of “A Hedonist in the Cellar: Adventures in Wine” and others

Korea's TVN channel debuts drama based on lauded webcomic "The Great Catsby" - starring MC Mong, Park Ye-Jin, Kang Kyung-Joon.

An internet comic sensation that vaulted the career of manhwa-ka (that’s “comic writer/artist” in Korean) Kang Doha in the mainstream pop-culture of Korea a couple of years ago, The Great Catsby (위대한 캣츠비, weedayhan Catsby) is finally coming to TV as a drama. The first episode will be broadcast July 4th on the Korean cable
channel TVN.

The comic that touched upon the coming-of-age trials and tribulations of twenty-somethings in a rundown part of Seoul was unique for a few reasons:

1. all the main characters are drawn as anthropomorphic animals, usually cats or dogs
2. their stories were brutally honest and real, able to reach out to and transcend an age-gap of readers who ranged from teens in high-school to even 30-40 year olds.
3. the drawing style is simple yet realistic, with many of the comic panels taking on the visual qualities of cinema and at times paying attention to fine details. (as the first in a trilogy of titles by Kang, that visual language gets perfected as he moves onto his next projects, read on.)

In any case, it’s been a favorite read of mine. Then again I don’t read too many comics, but trust me, this one’s a keeper.
If you don’t believe me, its popularity is vetted by the 5 million views it got when it was serialized on Korean portal sites, over 200,000 books sold, and winning the 2005 Grand Comic Award in Korea. The title was turned into a musical last March, and after the drama’s run will be made into a movie as well. For now, it is available free to view and translated to English at NetComics.com, who also publishes the manhwa – in full color, natch – and many other titles in book-form as well.

Any way, after all this success, the comic is now a drama. The cast was only announced in May and includes singer(DJ)-turned-actor MC Mong as Catsby, Park Ye-Jin as Persu, and Kang Kyung-Joon as Houndu (left-to-right in the above ‘human’ picture).

Characters of "The Great Catsby" from Manhwa-ka Kang Doha's original drawings

Manhwa-ka Kang Doha said of the drama,

“Although there isn’t a chance for the writer to squeeze in the drama-making system, I’m happy just to be able to see the process of restructuring and making it anew with on-screen magic while retaining the framework of the source material.”

read on for more info on the plot, drama director and comic creator’s reaction to the first episode.

The original comic story is centered around the title character Catsby, an unemployed guy in his late-twenties, as he reels out of a six-year relationship he’s had with another feline, Persu. Persu is just getting married to a much older man and something about that doesn’t sit well with Catsby. Houndu, Catsby’s roommate and friend from college that’s a
bit older, is in-between tutoring gigs and is about to open a whole new can of worms in the form of another married woman. Catsby also starts to get involved with Sun, an enigma of a girl whom he met through a matchmaking service. That’s a summary/set-up as written by me from reading the comic.

Of course, the drama is taking liberties with the story line and developing it into something more geared toward raising viewer numbers, so from the sneak-preview it seems to start with a love triangle that in the book does not reveal itself until later. Catsby starts at age 28, which seems much older (by life experience) than the 26 from the comic. What other inevitable differences there are are in story, we’ll have to wait and see.

Now that the drama is in full production mode, The Hankyoreh quotes Producing Director Lee Kang Hoon of the drama:

“Filling in the white space of the original [comic] material with realistic elements is the extent of what has changed.  [We] really worked hard to bring to life the honest and not-so-pedantic youthful characters , and when the dialog of the drama and the original differed we went for the original, even if it was more literary.”

By ‘literary,’ I’m sure he meant prose-like, as in the difference between spoken language and written language.

And after seeing the first episode, Kang commented,

“It seems like [they were] able to set a distance from the source material and develop their own language [fitting of a drama's vocabulary].”

If anything I really hope this does well. Even though Korea has made successful dramas out of other manhwa material, usually they were the safe choices of the traditional romance types, like Full House (starring Rain and Song Hye Gyo) or Goong (궁). The Great Catsby is a internet comic that didn’t use traditional comic visual languages and its wide popularity means that it surpassed the limits of the internet to reach a large fanbase. If that means a better chance for other internet comic titles to get a crossover effect, both fields will benefit with wider audiences.

Since the end of The Great Catsby, Kang has gone on to write/draw two more titles, in what he calls the “Youth Trilogy” (청춘 삼부작, chung-choon sambujak) with the completed “Romance Killer” and the still on-going “Kubrick” (read as q-brick, not like the film director’s name).

Though I haven’t watched Korean dramas in years, this is definitely one I’ll keep my eyes on.

• original news article on The Hankyoreh (in Korean)
• TVN The Great Catsby drama website (seemingly needs Internet Explorer)
• youtube music video of the drama
• Netcomics.com (English translation publisher of comic The Great Catsby, free to view online)
• DramaWiki k-drama entry
• Amazon.com (Buy the Netcomics books at discount, almost $4-$5 off)