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Asterios Polyp |  | Author: David Mazzucchelli
Publisher: Pantheon
Category: Book
List Price: $29.95
Buy New: $16.33
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Seller: zp_books
Rating:  55 reviews
Sales Rank: 7890
Media: Hardcover
Pages: 344
Number Of Items: 1
Shipping Weight (lbs): 2.9
Dimensions (in): 11 x 8.8 x 1.7
ISBN: 0307377326
Dewey Decimal Number: 741.5973
EAN: 9780307377326
ASIN: 0307377326
Publication Date: July 7, 2009
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
The triumphant return of one of comicsâ greatest talents, with an engrossing story of one manâs search for love, meaning, sanity, and perfect architectural proportions. An epic story long awaited, and well worth the wait.
Meet Asterios Polyp: middle-aged, meagerly successful architect and teacher, aesthete and womanizer, whose life is wholly upended when his New York City apartment goes up in flames. In a tenacious daze, he leaves the city and relocates to a small town in the American heartland. But what is this âescapeâ really about?
As the story unfolds, moving between the present and the past, we begin to understand this confounding yet fascinating character, and how heâs gotten to where he is. And isnât. And we meet Hana: a sweet, smart, first-generation Japanese American artist with whom he had made a blissful life. But now sheâs gone. Did Asterios do something to drive her away? What has happened to her? Is she even alive? All the questions will be answered, eventually.
In the meantime, we are enthralled by Mazzucchelliâs extraordinarily imagined world of brilliantly conceived eccentrics, sharply observed social mores, and deftly depicted asides on everything from design theory to the nature of human perception.
Asterios Polyp is David Mazzucchelliâs masterpiece: a great American graphic novel.
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Showing reviews 1-5 of 55
 Worth the Time July 30, 2009
Seth T. Hahne (SoCal)
24 out of 26 found this review helpful
Reading Asterios Polyp is a daunting experience. Or maybe not so much the reading, which can be accomplished easily enough, but the being able to speak sensibly about it afterward. I feel kind of like how I did after finishing Bolaño's 2666: A Novel, only not quite so out of my depth. Like Bolaño, Mazzucchelli's work here displays a breadth and depth that overtly requires multiple readings in order find ground solid enough to speak with any authority about the book.
But since I've only read the book once, you'll have to be satisfied with my initial thoughts. Asterios Polyp is, in the simplest terms, a coming-of-age story--one in which the fifty-year-old lead, celebrated architect Asterios Polyp, begins a quest to put away the childish things of his past and embarks on journey of both self-discovery and exploration of the world as it is rather than how he has intended to see it for so long. In this aspect, Asterios reminded me of Mr. Ryder from Ishiguro's The Unconsoled, a man at the top of his rarefied field who still must learn to grow up. And like Ryder, Asterios suffers from an inability to see the world as it is and is (really, like us all) victim to his own perceptions.
Reality, perception, and memory play a huge role in Mazzucchelli's work here even as they do in everything I've yet read by Ishiguro.
On top of this is layered the framework of Greek tragedy and specific allusion to the myth of Orpheus (this is pointed out through fistfuls of overt clues, not the least of which is a dream in which Asterios takes the role of Orpheus and his ex-wife Hana embodies Eurydice). We get narrative explanations from a meta-source in the Greek choral tradition. Comparisons to Dionysus and Apollo lead to an evaluation of dualistic systems (and perhaps systems generally) as Asterios gradually must free himself from systemic shackles in order to finally grow up. Of course we suspect if Asterios abandons one aspect he will be destroyed even as Orpheus was for abandoning Dionysius. As well, there are plenty of references to The Odyssey and this cross-pollination of mythologies only serves to enrich our experience of Asterios' journey.
The subject matter, by its summary, sounds simple enough but Mazzucchelli throws so much into this piece and exercises such deft control over the page that one can easily drown in the details. The art is very particular. Much is made of Mazzucchelli's use of colour through the book and, well, with good reason. The colouring itself offers storytelling that is available through no other means. In fact, so occasionally powerful is his use of colour that I worry for colourblind readers, that they might miss out on some of the book's more sublime moments.
On top of Mazzucchelli's tight reign over his colour spectrum, there is ample evidence that he maintains the same level of control over his linework and design. Asterios Polyp is a thoroughly designed experience, with every element from script to story to illustration to panel design to colouration to control of whitespace adding voice to the chorus of this performance. The battle between geometric and organic shapes gives the reader (who may not be familiar with all the names and ideas Asterios or his ghostly narrator reference) a hook on which to hang the interpreter's hat. One's experience of Asterios Polyp will no doubt be more enriched by a working knowledge of architectural history, familiarity with Greek mythology and Homeric tradition, and a smackerel of understanding of postmodern sculpture--but Mazzucchelli's conveyance of story through his visual sense means that even those with Asterios-sized gaps in their education can still get in there and have some deeper sense of what's going on.
As of this writing, I have only read Asterios Polyp once. Of course I still have questions. Of course I do. I think I understand the ending, but I'd like to reread and think on it again. I think I understand why he physically takes on the identity of his true last name in the book's final act (Polyp is only half his original surname, as the immigration official chopped in half the family name when his father immigrated to America). I sometimes understand what Mazzuchelli intends with his character names and sometimes not. I have the barest kernel of an idea why Mazzuchelli, in a mature work that depicts nudity and violence, insists on representing verbal obscenity with cartoony symbolic representation (e.g. "We made up a $#@*load of these"). I don't yet fully grasp Asterios' Ignazio dreams. I am certain, however, that many of these things will become more clear on subsequent readings.
As I said, I have only read Asterios Polyp once. And I can't wait to change that fact.
Words fail July 13, 2009
James Wu (Boston, MA, USA)
20 out of 23 found this review helpful
I waited for this book in the same fashion that I waited for Thomas Pynchon's Against the Day, and Haruki Murakami's Kafka on the Shore, and as with both of those books, not only was I *not* disappointed, I was amazed that these men not only raised the bar, but cleared it, with room to spare.
In the case of Asterios Polyp, I am glad to say that the wait is over, and Mazzucchelli has delivered not just the masterpiece we all knew he had in him, but probably the graphic novel we will still be talking about ten years from now, in the same way we talk about Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons' Watchmen. Groundbreaking, emotional, inventive, sly, thought-provoking: Mazzucchelli has opened a door and shown us a room we never knew was in this house before. Bravo. I will have to buy a second copy soon as I have already loaned out the one I bought to my best friend.
Existentialism + Humanism + a wild ride of a story = Riveting August 15, 2009
E. Pierce
8 out of 8 found this review helpful
Those who have spent the majority of their lives jumping through professional hoops (academic or otherwise) only to be blind-sided by the joylessness of the destination will recognize themselves here. As with our protagonist, a sophisticated armoring of the ego serves for a time to obscure the truth, but that truth eventually leaks in, rendering what were once bright and shiny objects of desire to be simply soggy, mostly irrelevant objects.
An effective conveyance of the heart of territory explored by Proust, Sartre, Nietzsche, and virtually every author on Buddhism is not what you expect to find in a deceptively simple, clean-lined, colorful, and humorous cartoon. And Mr. Mazzucchelli does keep his figures cartoony, unlike Shaun Tan's magnificent "The Arrival" which transmits its equally poignant story with the power of sepia-toned, three-dimensional portraiture and magical landscapes. Indeed, the contrast between the playful visual style and the depth of the content in "Asterios Polyp" creates a wonderful tension - the kind that keeps you just off-balance enough to want more, all the way through to the end.
It's very hard to pick my favorite scenes from the book (warning: skip this paragraph if you don't want to know anything about the story before you read it): the guy on the bus showing the tattoo on his lip, the absurd innuendos of the supercilious choreographer, the meteor foreshadowing, the review of Asterios' sexual conquests through the decades, the shock of seeing a 50 year transformation of Asterios' father within 2 panels, etc. But if I had to pick two, one would be the collage of Asterios' haunted memories of all the mundane, intimate and unglamorous moments of living with Hana and how precious each of them had become once she was gone. The other would be the afternoon Asterios rests after building the treehouse, when Mr. "Locked Within His Head" enters a moment of pure "being-ness" with all sensory filters unblocked and all thought-process noise turned off. Absolutely magical.
Thank you, Mr. Mazzucchelli, for creating a masterpiece. I hope it will be marketed by your publisher like an Updike or Pynchon novel, and not ushered into the graphic novel offshoot category that most folks don't yet know what to make of. You have taken a major step in helping GNs take their deserved role in mainstream literature, by showing exactly what nuances of meaning could NOT have been depicted on a page of nothing but text.
Impressive July 12, 2009
morl8tr
14 out of 16 found this review helpful
I'm a relatively new follower of the graphic novel literary genre, so perhaps a somewhat inexpert reviewer. I haven't followed David Mazzucchelli's work over the years or anything, but someone recommended this to me and I picked it up. And "Wow" is the right word for it. This GN takes you through the entire range of emotional responses that a really great text novel does. It's extremely engaging, and there's something, some little detail at least, that delights on just about every page. I also had the sense reading it that I need to read it again more closely, the way one should read such serious literature. Because there are deep literary resonances here. I heartily recommend it.
That's Why They Say "Rest in Peace" July 17, 2009
James Miller
5 out of 5 found this review helpful
Asterios Polyp is quite simply the most well written and conceived graphic novel of the decade (so far).
Like Gatsby and his melancholy we see a life so full of achievement and "balance" shatter, and then is reformed.
Jungian archetypes, philosophy, mysticism. It's all here, splendidly drawn and edited by a true master.
This is what this medium can do, folks.
Do yourself a favor; and buy this novel.
Showing reviews 1-5 of 55
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