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stromberg's review
challenging
dark
emotional
mysterious
reflective
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? It's complicated
- Loveable characters? It's complicated
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? Yes
5.0
Pretty is prettier when messy, and strangeness enhances beauty. In this gorgeous digital art book, unruly, delicate, messy beauty spills across page after page. Arresting specificity fades to blurred hints of colour, colour that splashes beyond the lines which bound it.
The story comes through only in morsels, telegraphic vignettes of tumultuous human relationships bursting with yearning adoration or with hostile antagonism. What we read is in service not of plot but of mood.
The book portrays an emotional universe of heightened intensities, of perpetual beauty and tragedy, where beauty often is bloodied. It ranges from the languorously sensual to the sticky-icky: promiscuous lust and open wounds, catastrophic prettiness and the lonesomeness of emotional squalor, light gore and too many cigarettes, alluring fluidity of gender and of sexuality.
If that sounds like your jam, then I assure you that this book is your jam.
The story comes through only in morsels, telegraphic vignettes of tumultuous human relationships bursting with yearning adoration or with hostile antagonism. What we read is in service not of plot but of mood.
The book portrays an emotional universe of heightened intensities, of perpetual beauty and tragedy, where beauty often is bloodied. It ranges from the languorously sensual to the sticky-icky: promiscuous lust and open wounds, catastrophic prettiness and the lonesomeness of emotional squalor, light gore and too many cigarettes, alluring fluidity of gender and of sexuality.
If that sounds like your jam, then I assure you that this book is your jam.
Content Warnings
Moderate: Gore
zillanovikov's review
emotional
reflective
sad
slow-paced
- Plot- or character-driven? N/A
- Strong character development? N/A
- Loveable characters? Yes
- Diverse cast of characters? Yes
- Flaws of characters a main focus? It's complicated
5.0
Merey's books lodge themselves in my heart, take up residence somewhere near the left auricle, leave me breathless and internally bleeding. His books are raw and visceral and they hurt like memory.
The characters in The Pink and the Blue are drawn in their truest sense, sometimes so transparent that you can see the city through their outlines, sometimes melting off the page, sometimes with limbs scattered around the bedroom. It's body horror, but the horror is that it reflects a reality that we fail to observe when we look at a person in meatspace and think they are whole, think they are okay. As always, art is truer than life, because art is not bound by physics or convention.
I got this book in physical form because I needed to touch it. It's hard to explain why. It's digital art, and there's a note that the colours are brighter in the pdf version. But I need to touch the pages, to run my fingertips over the smooth paper of textured pixels and images of cut outs. I needed the book to be as real in my hands as it is in my heart.
clari's review
5.0
This book is so gorgeous; I want to touch it, lick it, hold it close to me forever. It's like David Lynch at his most. Snippets of a life, that we can only gaze at but never understand. A photograph torn up with its centre seared out. This book challenges us to admit the existence of our inner voyeur and refuses to make any moral judgements. It mixes together Arthur Rimbaud, France, Japan, an as yet unpublished novel and shows us the fleshy, broken people that emerge. It is real and raw and sensual, it is a dreamscape, it is beautiful.
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