Word: heuet
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...folly or masterpiece, the French comix artist Stéphane Heuet has decided to adapt Marcel Proust's "Remembrance of Things Past." Proust's masterwork, a seven-volume, 4000-plus page French novel published between 1913 and 1922 will become twelve comicbook volumes published between 1998 and perhaps 2020. The first of these has now been translated into English (NBM Publishing, $19.95, hardcover...
...Heuet has squeezed the first of Proust's volumes, "Swann's Way," into 72, full-color, large-size pages. When it first appeared in France in 1998 it caused a literary scandal, as only the French can manage. Since then the French version has reportedly sold over 40,000 copies. (Can you imagine Americans caring enough? It brings a melancholy tear...
...This first part, which Heuet calls "Combray," begins with the narrator being swept back to boyhood by the scent of a cookie. From there it reads episodically, dreamily recounting summertime events during a now-lost Edwardian age that includes bed-ridden aunts, earthy servants, looking at magic lantern shows, and fussing over the intricacies of propriety and social rank. Most crudely, it's about how the boy learns to appreciate beauty, and the way art can capture...
...Anyone who has ever read Hergé's Tintin will recognize Heuet's classically European "clear-line" style of drawing. Landscapes, architecture, dress, and ephemera are rendered in exacting detail while character's faces are left drastically simplified. It makes for wonderful atmosphere. Particularly with Veronique Dorey's exceptionally rich coloring, you feel totally immersed in this world...