The complexity of walking to the corner with someone: A Swedish book review

 by Gerald Heng

                                          Walk me to the corner     

                                              Anneli Furmark  

                                            Montreal: D&Q

Somewhat by whimsical chance, I picked up Anneli Furmark's Walk me to the corner at the Stockholm library Seriebiblioteket. Anneli Furmark is a well known Swedish painter and comic artist who has a few books (mostly in Swedish) under her belt including Red Winter, one of 2016 Angouleme official selection. She is based in northern Sweden. You can take a look at her works at her website. Seriebiblioteket is one of Stockholm's public libraries, but is dedicated to the world of comics and comics scholarship, and is where I go to get my irregular dose of new comics-reading materiel. I have been meaning to read her book for a while now, but had not got around to it. It has now been two weeks since I checked it out and it is a beguiling book. I been going back to different sections of the book again and again. I might have to get my own copy of the book, as it is almost time to return it to the library. I don't think I will be done exploring this book thoroughly for a while yet, maybe because it is touching on something that is weighing heavily on my mind at the moment.

The book's main protagonist, Elise, shows her thoughts and her desire for Dagmar, and the subsequent consequences of that on her marriage to Henrik. The book also follows Elise's logic and thinking including her selfish reactions to Henrik's rejection of her ideal world, where her desire for Dagmar should have no impact on her marriage, because she still loves him the most. The story-lines wander through dinner with girlfriends, walks with her son, sessions with a therapist and frustration with a Swedish flyttkartong*, are all wonderfully engrossing. The ending part, 'Amusement Park,' is spot on in its analogy.

I am not sure if the story-lines in the book come from her life or from other sources, but Furmark has done a masterful work putting the age-old delicate twin topics of love and desire down on the pages. I keep going back to this question, "What is love?" The desire part is pretty much laid out in the book as Elsie's relationship with Dagmar, but the love part is quite unclear. Elise claims she love both Dagmar and Henrik, but to varying degrees. This gets more convoluted later on when Henrik told Elise he has started his own romantic relationship with someone which leads to Elise falling apart, unable to deal with this revelation.  Maybe the question is intended to be unanswered in the book. This is probably something everyone will have to decide for one's self due to its very nebulous and capricious nature. Maybe it is human nature -- to love oneself the most -- finally at the end of that question.  There is a self-centered duality hinted at in Elise's dinner with her girlfriends where she tells of the wonderfulness of having a passionate relationship with someone she completely connects with, but yet she still needs the long term comforting safety of her marriage with Henrik. So it's apparently a question with no one correct answer, excluding major religions' thinking about fidelity.

Her use of ink, pencil, watercolors washes, more pencil shading, color pencils to tell the story leaves me in awe. The artwork is a mishmash of different techniques but its use to tell the story is perfect. It gels so well for me. If you haven't read it yet, I recommend it highly.

* A wonderful cardboard moving box which comes flat, but builds into a box without any tape and has its own subculture in Sweden and is highly sought after in South Africa, as I discovered when I moved there for work.

Book Review - The Waiting by Keum Suk Gendry-Kim

Keum Suk Gendry-Kim. The Waiting. Montreal:  Drawn & Quarterly, 2021. 246 pp. 978-1-77046-457-5. US $24.95. https://drawnandquarterly.com/waiting

  reviewed by John A. Lent

South Korean graphic novelist Keum Suk Gendry-Kim has a knack for digging up personal stories related to historical tragedies of her country. She is truly what I call an “investigative cartoonist.” Gendry-Kim has used these reportorial skills over and over during the past decade. They are evident in her many awards-winning graphic novel, Grass (2019), the story of the “comfort women,” enslaved East Asian girls used to sexually service Japanese soldiers during World War II, as told to her by one surviving Korean comfort woman and backed up by nine other victims. Gendry-Kim found an elderly Korean man still living in Japan who experienced one of the atomic bombings while working in Japan in the 1940s, willing to explain how he and fellow Korean laborers were passed over and denied reparation funds by the Japanese government, in her A Day with Grandfather (2017).

Mixing fiction and fact, Gendry-Kim continues to bring attention to Korean national tragedies through the personal experiences of those who endured them. Among her 20 or so books, all completed since 2012, are Jiseul (2015), an account of the massacre of civilians by the South Korean army during the Korean War, and her latest title, The Waiting (2021).

The marginal status of women in a patriarchal society such as Korea is a common theme in Gendry-Kim’s books, as it is in The Waiting. In fact, very few men appear in this story inspired by her mother’s personal experiences at the end of the Korean War, and a few men who do show up are not desirable characters--the neighbor who steals a child’s dog and cooks it; a slothful male who abandons his sister-in-law and her child under terrible conditions.

During and after the Korean War, many families were separated, as were Gendry-Kim’s mother and her mother’s sister (Gendry-Kim’s aunt), who never made it out of North Korea. The Waiting weaves between Gendry-Kim’s present feelings of sorrow and guilt for having to leave her mother in Seoul and moving to Ganghwa Island; her mother’s anxiety about her sister’s fate in North Korea and her disappointment at continually not being chosen for the regularly-arranged separated family reunions, and the fictional character Gwila’s sorrowful tale of being separated from her husband and son during the war.

Gendry-Kim based her story on her own feelings, her mother’s testimonies, the tales of two elderly people she interviewed who had been able to meet their North Korean family members, and her further research. In a two-page textual afterword, “A Lifetime of Waiting,” the author begins with, “This is my mother’s story,” and ends it by dedicating the book to her mother. In between, she shares a bit about her own career and the fears and wishes of her two interviewees and asks questions others have asked for millennia--“How many people in this world have been wounded by war?” and “How many have had their loved ones torn from them because of war?” As the song says, “the answer, my friend, is blowing in the wind.”

The Waiting is a full package of emotions:  hope and despair, love and hate, joy and sorrow, kindness and cruelty, guilt and relief, and the terribleness of war without a positive corollary. The book is true to Gendry-Kim’s standard--a great read, first-hand researched, and filled with penetrating thoughts relatable to the many who have experienced war firsthand, and sobering to those who have romanticized, sanitized, and glamorized notions of war.