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Summary
Summary
Best of 2018 nods from the Washington Post , New York Public Library, Globe and Mail, the Guardian , and more!
"The magic in Berlin is in the way Lutes conjures, out of old newspapers and photographs, a city so remote from him in time and space... [ Berlin has] an ending so electrifying that I gasped."-- New York Times Book Review
During the past two decades, Jason Lutes has quietly created one of the masterworks of the graphic novel golden age . Berlin is one of the high-water marks of the medium: rich in its well-researched historical detail, compassionate in its character studies, and as timely as ever in its depiction of a society slowly awakening to the stranglehold of fascism.
Berlin is an intricate look at the fall of the Weimar Republic through the eyes of its citizens--Marthe Müller, a young woman escaping the memory of a brother killed in World War I, Kurt Severing, an idealistic journalist losing faith in the printed word as fascism and extremism take hold; the Brauns, a family torn apart by poverty and politics. Lutes weaves these characters' lives into the larger fabric of a city slowly ripping apart.
The city itself is the central protagonist in this historical fiction. Lavish salons, crumbling sidewalks, dusty attics, and train stations: all these places come alive in Lutes' masterful hand. Weimar Berlin was the world's metropolis, where intellectualism, creativity, and sensuous liberal values thrived, and Lutes maps its tragic, inevitable decline. Devastatingly relevant and beautifully told, Berlin is one of the great epics of the comics medium.
Author Notes
Jason Lutes was born in New Jersey in 1967 and grew up reading American superhero and Western comics. In the late 1970s he discovered Heavy Metal magazine and the tabletop role-playing game Dungeons & Dragons, both of which proved major influences on his creative development. Lutes graduated from the Rhode Island School of Design with a BFA in illustration, and in 1993 he began drawing a weekly comics page called Jar of Fools for Seattle's The Stranger . Lutes lives in Vermont with his partner and two children, where he teaches comics at the Center for Cartoon Studies.
Reviews (3)
Booklist Review
*Starred Review* Weimar Berlin, with its cultural vibrancy, sexual libertinism, and political turmoil, has inspired any number of acclaimed narratives by creators from Isherwood to Fassbinder. The completion of Berlin, which Lutes has been serializing for more than two decades, adds another formidable work to that list. The monumental graphic novel opens in 1928, with the fateful meeting of aspiring artist Marthe Müller and journalist Kurt Severing on a Berlin-bound train. Newcomer Müller is increasingly drawn to the city's vitality, while Severing's innate cynicism grows into despair as he witnesses the rise to power of the National Socialists. In addition to this central pair, Lutes follows the lives of a handful of representative Berliners, including struggling workers, a divided Jewish family, Communists and Nazis, a wealthy socialite, and a touring group of African American jazz musicians, all set against his vividly rendered portrayal of the teeming metropolis. Lutes' unfussy graphic approach is derived from the European ligne claire cartoon style, a geographically and stylistically appropriate technique for his complex, sprawling tale. When Lutes launched his ambitious effort in 1996, he had no way of knowing how prescient and timely its story of idealistic radicals resisting violent white nationalists in the streets would be by the time he completed it.--Gordon Flagg Copyright 2018 Booklist
New York Review of Books Review
EVERY 40 PAGES ?G SO in Jason Lutes's BERLIN (Drawn + Quarterly, $49.95), a sequence appears that seems to hold the key to this massive graphic novel. In one of the earliest, a drawing instructor stands before a chalkboard, lecturing on the use of perspective. "The observer's location is what really determines the placement of a vanishing point," he explains, and asks his students to consider the views out of three adjacent windows in the studio. "Stand still in front of each and imagine it as a framed picture." The same scene looks different depending on the observer's position. It's a metaphor, of course, for the book itself - an opus of more than 500 pages set in the late 1920s in the titular city, teeming with journalists and junkmen, artists and runaways, fiery rabble-rousers and burnt-out cases from the First World War, perceiving the city with their own nervous systems. Lutes's labors are the stuff of legend. After the publication of his acclaimed debut, "Jar of Fools" (1994), Lutes - an American who had never been to Germany - had a eureka moment upon spotting a magazine ad for a book on Weimar Berlin. He would spend the next 22 years realizing his version of that world. "Jar of Fools" was both of the '90s and timeless, a slim fable of magicians on the lam in Seattle. The magic in "Berlin" is in the way Lutes conjures, out of old newspapers and photographs, a city so remote from him in space and time. He populates "Berlin" with characters of every age, social class, and political persuasion: Gudrun Braun, newly unemployed by the zeppelin factory and a mother of three, desperate to make ends meet; three generations of the Jewish Schwartz family, including David, a paperboy hawking the communist periodical A.I.Z.; and Pola Mosse, a nude artists' model who moonlights as a cabaret performer, singing cheeky paeans to modernity. At times Lutes bridges his characters' disparate story lines with dreams, fleeting thoughts and scraps of mass media. In this way "Berlin" invokes the polyphonic techniques found in such modernist works as "Ulysses," "U.S.A.," and most pertinent, Alfred Döblin's "Berlin Alexanderplatz" of 1929. Real-life figures such as Josephine Baker, Adolf Hitler and the jailed editor Carl von Ossietzky (a Nobel Peace Prize laureate) make cameos, mingling with Lutes's invented lives. Our guides through this welter of voices and episodes are Kurt Severing, a grizzled journalist for Ossietzky's paper Die Weltbühne, and Marthe Müller, a young woman escaping her stifling bourgeois upbringing in Köln to launch her sentimental education in the capital. The two meet on a train at the very start, and we know before they do that their lives are now linked. With a cigarette welded to his lips, the bespectacled Severing resembles a more dashing Barton Fink. He's witnessed how Germany, in defiance of the Treaty of Versailles, has been developing military aircraft. He's concerned yet politically uncommitted, trusting his own judgment "over any decrees handed down from Munich or Moscow." In a bravura passage, sitting at his desk listening to the clacking of typewriters up and down the street, Severing muses that he can "pick out the coded signatures of men whose work I know: a cuckold theater critic, a dime novelist at play, a shut-in literary essayist, a freelance advertising writer." He imagines that each page is like a stone, set against the river of time, perhaps one day reaching critical mass and diverting the course of history. But will it happen soon enough? Anyone who's watched 10 minutes of the news in the last two years will feel the tug of relevance in these pages, something Lutes couldn't have predicted back in the 1990s, when he began the series. Actual swastikas don't appear until late in the book; Lutes simply adorns the Nazi flags with white circles, an omission that's perversely effective, making us see the moment when people still might have thought fascism couldn't win. From its topical concerns to its appendix of historical notes, "Berlin" screams Important Graphic Novel. And it is: Lutes is incapable of drawing a lazy panel. His scrupulous style makes everything from the font of a store sign to a parlor wallpaper pattern worthy of study, and even his onomotopeia has the ring of genius: the "takka tak tak" of typewriter, the sudden "AHOOGA!" of a car horn on a busy street. But "Berlin" is an unpredictable, at times difficult read. Not all of the characters exist in three dimensions; occasionally the airtight aesthetic screams for something less objective. The dirty secret about graphic novels is how fast they read; it's rare for one to require more than a day or two to finish. ("I hated the lifetime of pain and struggle it took to create a thing that anyone could read in an hour," sighs the cartoonist in Matthew Klam's novel "Who Is Rich?") Strange as it sounds, one of the virtues of "Berlin" is how it resists completion. It took me weeks to get through, at times backtracking in order to clarify who was who, always returning at last to a greater appreciation of Lutes's vision and humanity. In the last pages, the book pitches suddenly, violently forward through time, as though to meet us - an ending so electrifying that I gasped. Olivier Schrauwen, a Belgian artist based in Berlin, has come up with a simpler way to manipulate time. In "Arsene Schrauwen" (2014), a sort of hallucinated account of a chapter in his grandfather's life, the action halts 50 pages in. "Please wait one week before reading further," runs a message over a patterned backdrop. I acquiesced, returning seven days later to the message on the facing page: "Thanks for waiting." Such politeness is at odds with the anarchic rudeness of Schrauwen's books, which exist on the other side of the mirror from "Berlin." His latest, parallel LIVES (Fantagraphics, $24.99), IS a slim but potent volume of linked and mangled autofictions, with delirious color chords you only find in dreams. In the first of the new stories, "O. Schrauwen" offers an account of his abduction by " 'Grey Aliens' or 'Greys,'" and the drawings are aptly monochrome. On the spacecraft, he's forced to watch a movie about the entirety of human history, and things slide toward gibbering insanity until Schrauwen concludes with a deadpan tribute to his art form. Also in this garden of unearthly delights : an app that "allows you to experience life as a cartoon character in an animated world," a two-page story of 70 one-inch panels each, and a long final tale in which everything seems up for grabs, from sexuality and physics to the rules of storytelling itself. "I'm relaying what is happening to me in the form of a first person narrative," says one interstellar explorer brightly. "The audience, wherever, whoever, and whenever it is, will be captivated by my space adventure story." What nerve! And yet it's true. He gives his name as Olivier Schrauwen. ED park is the author of "Personal Days."
Library Journal Review
Lutes's (Jar of Fools) magnum opus stands as a masterpiece on par with any work of literature in any genre, since he began the project more than two decades ago. Opening in 1928 and continuing into the early 1930s, the story tracks art students, jaded journalists, revolutionaries, politicians, beggars, the idle rich, prostitutes, an American jazz group navigating the nightclub scene, and more, as the liberal stronghold of the Weimar Republic gives way to extremism and fascism. More than mere lenses through which to view historic events, each of the characters is wonderfully developed and authentic. Meticulously researched and told with real compassion for how a society might fall under the control of a hateful regime, this is history as seen from the streets, through attic windows and salons, and the back of the crowd during a riot. VERDICT An extraordinary epic that will leave readers both heartbroken and in awe of the virtuosic talent that went into its creation. [See the interview with Lutes on p. 61].-TB © Copyright 2018. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.