For some reason those who are dear to me have the impression that I would love to read more, but that I simply don’t have the time. My godson gave me a copy of Twitterature, a compendium of classic books and other literary works, retold in the limited format of Twitter posts.
The authors, Alexander Aciman and Emmett Rensin, are both University of Chicago students, who know their classics, and their Twitter (for the older readers, they also provide a handy guide to Twitter speak). The result is a series of quite funny pieces, ranging from the quite inane (The Iliad, with Achilles going on about being angry all the time) to the hilarious (the Twitter version of On the Road simply states, “For Twitterature of On The Road by Jack Kerouac, please see On The Road by Jack Kerouac”). And for those who love books as objects – the collection is published as a faux classic Penguin pocket, complete with the “original” pengiun insignia.
My mom, and now we’re getting to the Eurocomics element in this post, topped this with The 90 Classic Books For People In A Hurry by Swedish cartoonist Henrik Lange. This isn’t a new book (altough my edition, the Dutch one, is), but I think it deserves getting your attention. Lange takes ninety classic texts, from Tom Sawyer and Moby Dick to Life Of Pi and American Psycho, and tries to condense them in only one single page of four panels.
Rather than simply selecting four random or relevant fragments, Lange really digs into the themes of the book, and puts them to his reader in a deadpan fashion that seems to be totally bereft of any emotion. The end to Oliver Twist ? “Mr. Bronlow adopts Oliver and he gets a quite life in the country. All’s well that ends well.” (I’m paraphrasing here).
In this book, Lange retells ninety canonical books, from Tom Sawyer, through Death of a Salesman to bestsellerss like The Da Vinci Code and Life Of Pi, in one page each, with only four frames. In each case, he tries to really condense the book’s subject, not just pick out a few random key scenes. And this results in quite hilarious quotes, such as the ending to Robinson Crusoe : “‘He saves Friday from the cannibals. Then a ship comes, and Crusoe returns home, hoping to make money selling his story as a reality show”, or sideways remarks, such as in Death of A Salesman : “He gets fired, and now he’s an old ex-salesman who’s considered a failure by his sons Biff and Happy (Whoever would call his kids that ?)”.
As with Twitterature, the comedic effect gets bigger if you actually know the books that Lange’s retelling, and it’s sometimes even pitiful to see thick tomes of thoroughly wrought psychodramas being reduced to four off-the-cuff, almost Chandleresque remarks. Which in turn explains the quite cool cat-with-the-gun on the book’s cover.
The book is still in print in English, but if you search around of the internet, you will come across examples from this book, and Lange’s more recent collection, 99 Movies For People In A Hurry, in which he summarizes the most important films (in his opinion) in a similar fashion.
My only gripe about this book is that it’s sold as a “book of graphics”. I mean, this is a comic: it tells stories in a sequence of pictures with captions (and the odd balloon) – why not call it a comic ? Or are comics still only for kids ?
Thu, Jan 14, 2010
Comics and cartoons, From our Continental Correspondent