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mattdube 's review for:
Imagine Wanting Only This
by Kristen Radtke
I enjoyed this non-fiction graphic novel, though I also found it a little diffuse.... There are strands here, addressing grief over the death of her beloved uncle, for example, or more broadly, decay and travel/ rootlessness, or this thread about some photographs taken from, it's hard to explain, but a makeshift memorial cum art exhibit, that circulate but don't quite resolve over the course of the book (or maybe they just didn't resolve with the kind of explicit bang that I needed?). And while the quality of the prose was very high for a graphic novel (not to damn with faint praise-- Ratdtke is careful with language and it pays off), the quality of the visuals felt arbitrary, that she was using visual shortcuts and tools that were only casually related to the narrative problems she was confronting-- this applies to the images themselves, which might be representations of text, like search results, or photos collaged into the art or rotoscoped figures, or her page layout, which was sometimes sequential and somethings based in juxtaposition, though in neither case really connected to what was happening.... It was never bad, but it felt a little unsophisticated from the stance of making deliberate choices.
I did like a lot of us, despite my complaints above. It's interesting and thoughtful, and it does what you want a lot of non-fiction to do, to show you things about the world you didn't know, in the company of a guide who is conflicted in interesting ways. I just wanted some more convergence of the varying strands of this, or else a claim that these are related essays but not sequential.
I did like a lot of us, despite my complaints above. It's interesting and thoughtful, and it does what you want a lot of non-fiction to do, to show you things about the world you didn't know, in the company of a guide who is conflicted in interesting ways. I just wanted some more convergence of the varying strands of this, or else a claim that these are related essays but not sequential.