Still Life with Remorse: Family Stories

This glorious book of brief stories and observations is comparable to visiting an art museum accompanied by a warm, serious, and knowledgeable guide. What you are shown is some incidents and characters from Kalman's past, in Eastern Europe, Israel, and the US, before and after the Holocaust. And a varied cluster of authors and poets (Chekov, Rimbaud, Baudelaire, Kafka, and one unfamiliar to me, Mallarme); musicians (Clara Schuman, Brahms, Schubert, Mahler); and historical figures (Cleopatra, the Romanovs), and their tales told - whether speculation or facts not really mattering. Each story is enhanced by at least one gorgeous illustration in the artist's distinctly vivid colors. She really knows how to fill a room! This is a remarkable show more and affecting book to own, to ponder, and to treasure. show less

I only read this book as part of a project to read all the books on NPR's Favorite Graphic Novels list (see below), but it doesn't really fit my definition of a graphic novel. The pages alternate blocks of typeset text with full-page illustrations. There is no sequential storytelling. I feel misled, and I know that's not the fault of this book, but it did get me into a negative mood at the outset, so keep that in mind as I wallop the pitiful thing below.

Maira Kalman sort of tells anecdotes about her family, stretching from their origins in Belarus through their refugee journey to Palestine, Israel and then the United States. She keeps hitting return in the middle of sentences so a generous reader might decide they're a form of poetry show more and thus deserving of an extra star in the final rating for, y'know, art or sympathy or something. I mean, surely a sentence can't be boring if there's a hard return -- or three or four -- in the middle of it.

If she had stuck to family anecdotes, I might have given this book one more star, but Kalman also drops in random thoughts and stories about writers, painters, poets, and political leaders e.g., Leo Tolstoy, Franz Kafka, Pablo Picasso, Cleopatra, etc. It degenerates into a random mess, with words that become increasingly meaningless. I had to grit my teeth to get through the last half of the book.

Kalman isn't much of an artist either. As promised by the title, there are a lot of still life illustrations. They work a little better than the pictures featuring people, where Kalman's limitations are very much on display. Most of her portrait paintings seem to be poor reproductions of photographs I was able to find online. Maybe her still life studies are also? I don't know, and I don't care to spend the time looking.

Total waste of time.

(Best of 2024 Project: I'm reading all the graphic novels that made it onto one or more of these lists:
• Washington Post 10 Best Graphic Novels of 2024
• Publishers Weekly 2024 Graphic Novel Critics Poll
• NPR's Books We Love 2024: Favorite Comics and Graphic Novels

This book made the NPR list.) show less