Illustrated biography is more than a 'comic book'

When my children were school-age, the whole family would make a trip to Austin about once a month to eat in one of our favorite restaurants and afterwards visit Half Price Books. As soon as we arrived at Half Price, the four of us would split up, heading off to our own favorite section of books.

I would start in the literature or mystery section, the roommate in the history section, our son liked the children’s series books, and our daughter would pretty much plant herself in the manga section. When it was time to head home, I knew where to find everyone and herd them towards the door.

On one occasion, we were in a HP Books that I wasn’t entirely familiar with. I had trouble locating our daughter, so I went to the desk and asked, “Where are your graphic novels?”

The young man behind the counter answered, “We keep the erotica back here.”

I blinked a couple of times trying to figure out just how I had failed to communicate.

“Um, where is your comic book section?” I asked. He then directed me to the right area.

However, manga, graphic novels, and illustrated non-fiction are a great deal more than comic books. A good example is Joe Lee’s upcoming illustrated biography of Eva Kor, “Forgiveness,” which launches Oct. 5.

Eva Mozes was 10 years old and lived with her family in Romania when they were removed from their home in Operation Margarethe and sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau. Eva’s parents and two older sisters were immediately murdered by the Nazis. Eva and her twin sister, Miriam, were spared to become victims of Mengele’s heinous twin “experiments.”

Eva and Miriam both survived the Holocaust. They migrated to the new state of Israel where Eva met and married another Holocaust survivor, an America, who was visiting his brother in Israel.

But Eva was not to live “happily ever after” as her experiences at the hands of the Nazis haunted her. She finally came to realize that she had to forgive in order to move past the trauma.

For her own sake, she did forgive her torturers and went on to educate others about the Holocaust and especially about the twin experiments as well as lead groups from America to the remains of Auschwitz.

The brutal honesty of the story makes it compelling for adult audiences. After Eva was liberated, she and Miriam experienced PTSD. The Nazis were said to have used the fat from murdered Jews in the manufacture of soap, and “Eva would sometimes suffer auditory hallucinations when she imagined hearing Mama and Papa’s voices crying from the bar” (p 80).

However, the book is also appropriate for young adult readers. The straight-forward and simple retelling of the events that led up to the war and the Nazi crimes will appeal to middle school audiences. Even reluctant readers will be drawn to the moving illustrations.

The art is detailed and conveys the terror, grief, and fear of the Nazis’ victims as well as the depravity of the Nazis themselves. The simple black and white drawings suggest an old movie or a nightmare. Most of the illustrations in the first part of the book are very dark, some with large areas of solid black, especially the illustration of Hitler. This is contrasted by the illustrations in the last part of the book, which have more white space, and many more curves as opposed the sharp lines and angles of the first section.

Readers who enjoyed Art Spiegelman’s “Maus,” and more recently George Takei’s “They Called Us Enemy” or Marjane Satrapi’s “Persepolis,” will also appreciate this book.

'No Diving Allowed' a melancholy reflection of life

Many lovers of literature contend that poetry is the highest form. Poetry is certainly the most economical, condensed genre of literature. The poet creates sounds and images from just words, and in a few lines evokes memories, emotions, and insights.

Writers of short fiction have a similar task. Where a novelist has hundreds of pages to convince the reader to connect with the characters and events in his work, the short story writer has just a few pages.

In “No Diving Allowed” by Louise Marburg, due out Oct. 6, the author presents us with 14 stories of people struggling with disappointment, divorce, death, and heartbreak. Marburg’s clear, spare style allows her to engage the reader with complex, human, sympathetic characters in just 10 pages each.

As the title suggests, each story includes a swimming pool as central or incidental to the story. This thread throughout the book prompts the reader to consider how the pool functions in each story.

In some stories, the swimming pool is sparkling clear water that cools and refreshes. In another, the pool is as broken and empty as the lives of the characters.

Several of these short works present siblings, some who cannot overcome childhood conflicts and rivalries, and others who seem to be the only reliable emotional support for each other in a difficult world.

In the title story, Gareth visits his sister, Marion, whose husband cheated. Gareth and Marion spend the afternoon at the country club pool, where some sneering boys ask Gareth, who is obese, to do a cannonball. Marion is furious, but Gareth obliges and makes a huge splash. To the boys’ delight, he does it again. Marion and Gareth are run out of the club, and Marion will soon be run out of the home she loves, but the pair return home and sit “in an easy silence.”

Although all of the stories are about ordinary people navigating an ordinary but sometimes painful life, Marburg does offer the reader some hopeful stories. In “Attractive Nuisance,” the curmudgeonly narrator reluctantly befriends a neighbor boy who is lonely and teased by his classmates. 

Marburg’s stories are engaging, even if bittersweet, and give readers much to think about. Her style is similar to Vonnegut’s, and her subjects remind me of those in “The House on Mango Street.” There is a lot of life in just 145 pages of “No Diving Allowed.”