The Property
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5.0 • 1 Rating
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- $14.99
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- $14.99
Publisher Description
Included on more than ten Best of the Year lists, including the Guardian, Publishers Weekly, Salon, Amazon, and the Washington Post
The Property is a work that will inspire, fascinate, and delight readers and critics alike. Savvy and insightful, elegant and subtle, Rutu Modan’s second full-length graphic novel is a triumph of storytelling and fine lines. After the death of her son, Regina Segal takes her granddaughter Mica to Warsaw, hoping to reclaim a family property lost during the Second World War. As they get to know modern Warsaw, Regina is forced to recall difficult things about her past, and Mica begins to wonder if maybe their reasons for coming aren’t a little different than what her grandmother led her to believe. Modan offers up a world populated by prickly seniors, smart-alecky public servants, and stubborn women—a world whose realism is expressed alternately in the absurdity of people’s behavior and in the complex consequences of their sacrifices. Modan’s ever-present wit is articulated perfectly in her clear-line style, while a subtle, almost muted color palette complements the true-to-life nuances of her characterization. Exit Wounds made a huge splash for this signature combination of wit, style, and realism, and The Property will cement Modan’s status as one of the foremost cartoonists working today.
Translated from the Hebrew by Jessica Cohen.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Modan (Exit Wounds) has proven to be one of the most accessible of graphic novelists, with a cinematic presentation and the ability to capture the complexity of larger human experience within smaller family dramas. Her latest work takes readers on a trip to Warsaw with Mica and her grandmother, Regina, both from Israel. Their purpose in Poland is to check on some long lost property that Regina's father owned prior to the Holocaust; she fled during the war, thus becoming the only family member to survive. The understanding that families were fractured and lives rerouted after WWII is nothing new, but the particulars provide the story here family secrets and the measure of shame, historical and current attitudes between Poles and Jews, the changing views of cross-culture collusion when a hint of romance is involved, and the ways in which we don't so much reinvent ourselves as repurpose. The pursuit of old family documents is concurrent with the unearthing of family secrets, but Modan doesn't dole out the revelations with alarm or melodrama, but rather with a casual good nature toward her subjects, backed up with art somewhat reminiscent of Tintin but revealing the deepest memories of guilt and loss with merely the twitch of a line. A beautiful, fully realized story that's as much "novel" as "graphic".
