MONKEY FOOD: THE COMPLETE I WAS SEVEN IN ’75 COLLECTION
by Ellen Forney
(Fantagraphics) $12.95
Seattle cartoonist Ellen Forney mines familiar territory in her new trade paperback, Monkey Food, which collects her I Was Seven in ’75 comic strip serialized in The Stranger and other alternative publications. Situating herself squarely between the bombastic self-aggrandizement of autobiographical pioneer Dennis P. Eichhorn’s Real Stuff and the obsessive introspection of her Canadian colleagues Chester Brown, Joe Matt, and Julie Doucet, Forney documents the perils of pre-pubescence while growing up in a dysfunctional family in the ’70s.
Forney’s family is far too eccentric to reveal many of the broader implications of coming of age in the “Decade of Decadence.” Realistically, how many parents of her generation hosted neighborhood pot parties or packed up the kids for a weekend frolic at a nudist colony? She succeeds brilliantly, however, in chronicling the experiences of her adolescence that informed her adulthood. Forney’s self-deprecating honesty and unfailing humor distinguish her from a crowded field of naval-gazing, angst-laden cartoonists.
Perhaps due to the deadline pressures of weekly publication, Forney’s formidable artistic prowess is only sporadically evident in this collection, displayed primarily in the single-panel family portraits that separate the stories. It is the stories themselves that make Monkey Food a must-read. The self-contained weekly installations are woven seamlessly together and are most compelling when read in the collected format.
Forney is currently on a 12-city book tour that will bring her to Bailey/Coy Books (414 Broadway E.) on Thursday, October 21 at 7 p.m. If you have yet to experience her hilarious multimedia performance event based on I Was Seven in ’75, you won’t want to miss this opportunity to see her comic strip brought to life. LARRY REID
THE ABYSSINIAN
by Jean-Christophe Rufin, translated by Willard Wood
(W. W. Norton and Company) $25.95
Jean-Christophe Rufin’s romantic epic, The Abyssinian, sets off at a gallop in 1699. The race for Africa is on, and European nations are determined to carve up and claim the dark continent.
The novel’s hero is one Jean-Baptiste Poncet, a free-wheeling physician in Cairo, who for the sake of love becomes fecklessly embroiled in a series of ill-fated diplomatic overtures between the court of Louis XIV and the Negus (Emperor) of Abyssinia (modern-day Ethiopia). Poncet travels from Cairo to the enigmatic heart of the Abyssinian kingdom. The mission he is entrusted with has complications: Not only does Louis XIV want to lure Abyssinia into France’s sphere of influence, but the Christian orders — Jesuits and Capuchins alike — are avariciously vying for African souls.
Poncet manages to infiltrate Abyssinia and win the trust of the Negus by treating his illness. He must now relay an embassy back to Versailles, and so embarks on another treacherous journey through the cutthroat factionalism of Louis XIV’s court. All of this culminates in an entertaining scene in which Poncet mistakenly presents the king with a moldering elephant ear.
Rufin’s prose is elegant and coolly satiric, and the story canters on with an enjoyable relish for its own high adventure. There is no doubting the panoramic romance of the novel: Love, death, travel, religion, politics, farce, and the hero prevail. And what’s wrong with that? Nothing, except that the true subject of this book is imperialism, and all the wholesome happily-ever-after of this heroic epic becomes nauseatingly oppressive. It goes to show that Europeans still get off on having too much fun with colonial history. No doubt Hollywood will eat this book up: Brad Pitt-o-rama. Denzel Washington will have to be the Abyssinian patient. SONIA GOMEZ
LOST AND FOUND
LONDON AND THE LIFE OF LITERATURE IN LATE VICTORIAN ENGLAND: THE DIARY OF GEORGE GISSING, NOVELIST
edited by Pierre Costillas
(Harvester Press, 1978) Out of print
Who doesn’t have a favorite diary to read, even if it’s your older sister’s? Mine is the one kept a hundred years ago by George Gissing, a British novelist who was sort of a U.K. Zola. Maybe you’ve heard of him — he’s still got eight or so books in print, and one of them, New Grub Street, can even, by the barest of margins, be called a classic — but more likely you haven’t, and I’m not really saying that you should have.
What can you expect from a writer’s diary? Lyrical introspection? Dead-on character sketches? Stunning aphorisms? Kooky dreams? Despite his editor’s wildly overstated title, you won’t get any of that from Gissing: He’s no Cheever; no Nin. His diary reads more like a balance sheet: daily counts of pages going out and (less often) money coming in, and not much else. Here’s a sample: “July 29 [1890]: Fine. Did 2 pp. In evening broke down with wretchedness. July 30: No sleep at night. No work today. Misery. July 31: Fine, hot day. In better work again, did my 5 pp.” It goes on like that for 15 years and more than 500 closely printed pages. Oh, he makes a few trips to the European continent, which cause him to wax profound for pages on end in a high-culture swoon, but soon enough, thank God, he’s back in his grim and grimy little flat, noting the weather and counting the pages. Why do I find his stiff-lipped misery so delicious? Maybe it’s just the sheer arithmetic of it: the stripped-down equation of pages with money, the bullheadedly hopeful daily production of words that, once in a while, someone will still be reading a hundred years later. TOM NISSLEY