Goliath

64 WORLD LITERATURE TODAY reviews Basara leaves it up to the reader to make sense of his chaos. His many fictive strands either dovetail neatly into others or are left frayed and dangling . His secret society on “velocipedes ” or “diabolical two-wheelers” is bizarre but fun, and the idea of their persecution in dreams by a sinister Nazi “Traumeinsatz” unit shows off his unique creativity. Freud is there to analyze those dreams, but when the king, at one point wracked by doubt, says, “It is not to be excluded that all of this is just a dream,” we begin to weary of Basara’s overreliance on smoke and mirrors. Basara’s other novel in English, Chinese Letter (2004), opens with the protagonist confessing “I have nothing to say” and, later, “It appears that nothing is happening.” In the final analysis, the problem with The Cyclist Conspiracy is that Basara has too much to say and insists on too much happening. His inventiveness is a strength, indeed a talent, but he can’t keep its abundance in check. Sadly, the novel becomes too esoteric for its own good, with those less successful plot strands tying themselves up in knots and the whole thing eventually buckling under the weight of its amassed absurdities. Malcolm Forbes Berlin Libar M. Fofana. L’Étrange rêve d’une femme inachevée. Paris. Gallimard. 2012. isbn 9782070134816 Libar Fofana, whose father was imprisoned and tortured in one of Sékou Touré’s prisons, escaped from Guinea in 1976, when he was seventeen . After working in Europe, he began writing in 1993. His fifth novel, set in Guinea, tells the story of two conjoined twins, Hawa and Rama, the latter always called “Toumbou,” which means “worm.” They are raised by Saran, a widow who gives them love. They go to school, where Toumbou (Rama) shows some ability as a political leader, but where Hawa, who has legs, must do the physical work. When they are sixteen, a young man, Mamadi , falls in love with Hawa and makes love to her. Toumbou, of course, is there, observing, wishing she were the loved one. The twins leave briefly for a larger town, where they are tricked into allowing people to watch them. On returning to their village, Hawa realizes she is pregnant. When a doctor advises an abortion, as Toumbou is unlikely to survive a delivery, Toumbou reacts forcefully. Having a child will, she realizes, give purpose to the lives of both twins. The pregnancy, spent in a hospital where the doctor can observe them, becomes the happiest moment of their lives. The baby arrives, Toumbou dies, and the doctor cannot save Hawa. The baby, however, is normal and will bring some peace to Saran and to Mamadi. While occasionally referring to the Guinean government, which does little to help the common people, the novel is not political. Rather, it presents a situation that could occur anywhere . It tells the strange tale of the “unfinished woman” with simplicity and strength. Adele King Paris Tom Gauld. Goliath. Montréal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2012. isbn 9781770460652 As the graphic novel has developed as a form globally over the twentieth century, one expectation it has rarely been able to shed is length. Especially in the United States, the landmark works have trended toward two hundred pages or higher. It’s not an unreasonable conclusion for the most casual reader to make. As the graphic novel is presupposed to transcend the comic book as a narrative unit, it only follows that the form should require more pages to deliver a story of literary complexity. It is a telling sign of the graphic novel’s having reached a new stage of formal development that the market has produced some outstanding shorter pieces, taking on the task of delivering fully realized narrative experiences with fewer panels spent. An excellent recent example is Scottish cartoonist Tom Gauld’s Goliath. Gauld’s approach to visual storytelling shares sympathies with hipster comics from Paris to Portland. His pacing is very relaxed, drawing the reader into the story at only its key moments and drolly allowing them to play out with the decompression of a Wes Anderson film. His drawing...

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