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I've been slowly reading through Shaun Tan's Tale from the Inner City, short stories and poems that accompany beautiful paintings of animals surreally present in a nameless city. I'd put it on my to-read list years ago, but was actually moved to read it when a Japanese guy on my Twitter reading list wrote an essay about one of the stories.
The essay (which I haven't finished yet) is about the cat story. Both the cat story and the dog story-poem are lovely; they say touching things about dogs and cats in people's lives, and the two pieces complement each other. (The **art** for the dog story is breathtaking: painting after painting of dog-and-person through history. When I got the book from the library, I just sat in the car, poring over those paintings.)
But the other pieces that I've read so far, while they have some great insights and beautiful turns of phrase, on balance have a kind of negativity about the city as a place and about human-animal interactions that's depressing. Animals are presented as numinous, beautiful, ineffable beings that are destroyed by interaction with humans/the city. (The dog and cat stories stand out because that's NOT the case in them.)
I've just finished the story that accompanies the cover painting:
It's truly a gorgeous painting, yes?
In the story, a bunch of siblings climb to the roofs of sky scrapers to fish in the sky, and miraculously, the most dreamy of them catches a moon fish.
The details of fishing in the sky are wonderful--knocking down aerials, holding on to a chimney pipe, things like that--and the details of the anatomy of a fish that lives so high in the atmosphere are marvelous--ozone bladders, aerogel blood, swim bladder. But the story really zeros in on the fact that catching this beautiful creature means its death, and the profit the siblings' parents had hoped to glean from the children's catch slips away from them because the fragile flesh of such a fish decays so fast. So you're (or I, anyway) left with this sense of grief over the destruction of this beautiful creature, and yes, that's certainly a story you can tell about fishing or hunting, but I don't know... I wanted something different to go with that image. (The story does have a hopeful note in the end, but ehhnn)
And then there are the opening lines of the story: "Consider this: There's no ocean in our city. No lake, and no river. Well, no real river, more like a chemical drain that runs upside down with all the muck on top..." That's very typical of how the city is portrayed in the pieces: awful, alienating, miserable. And while that's an experience of "city," it's definitely not the only one. I think I was imagining the stories would be more neutral toward their setting, or even positive. Or at least a mix.
I'll see how the rest of the stories and poems go, but I'm not super sangine. The next one is really short, a poem: a rhino on the freeway is shot, and at first drivers are happy because this obstacle is gone, and then they're sad because it was the last rhino. -_-
But the dog and cat stories are really beautiful. They might be enough to redeem the rest of the book. And the paintings are marvelous.
The essay (which I haven't finished yet) is about the cat story. Both the cat story and the dog story-poem are lovely; they say touching things about dogs and cats in people's lives, and the two pieces complement each other. (The **art** for the dog story is breathtaking: painting after painting of dog-and-person through history. When I got the book from the library, I just sat in the car, poring over those paintings.)
But the other pieces that I've read so far, while they have some great insights and beautiful turns of phrase, on balance have a kind of negativity about the city as a place and about human-animal interactions that's depressing. Animals are presented as numinous, beautiful, ineffable beings that are destroyed by interaction with humans/the city. (The dog and cat stories stand out because that's NOT the case in them.)
I've just finished the story that accompanies the cover painting:
It's truly a gorgeous painting, yes?
In the story, a bunch of siblings climb to the roofs of sky scrapers to fish in the sky, and miraculously, the most dreamy of them catches a moon fish.
The details of fishing in the sky are wonderful--knocking down aerials, holding on to a chimney pipe, things like that--and the details of the anatomy of a fish that lives so high in the atmosphere are marvelous--ozone bladders, aerogel blood, swim bladder. But the story really zeros in on the fact that catching this beautiful creature means its death, and the profit the siblings' parents had hoped to glean from the children's catch slips away from them because the fragile flesh of such a fish decays so fast. So you're (or I, anyway) left with this sense of grief over the destruction of this beautiful creature, and yes, that's certainly a story you can tell about fishing or hunting, but I don't know... I wanted something different to go with that image. (The story does have a hopeful note in the end, but ehhnn)
And then there are the opening lines of the story: "Consider this: There's no ocean in our city. No lake, and no river. Well, no real river, more like a chemical drain that runs upside down with all the muck on top..." That's very typical of how the city is portrayed in the pieces: awful, alienating, miserable. And while that's an experience of "city," it's definitely not the only one. I think I was imagining the stories would be more neutral toward their setting, or even positive. Or at least a mix.
I'll see how the rest of the stories and poems go, but I'm not super sangine. The next one is really short, a poem: a rhino on the freeway is shot, and at first drivers are happy because this obstacle is gone, and then they're sad because it was the last rhino. -_-
But the dog and cat stories are really beautiful. They might be enough to redeem the rest of the book. And the paintings are marvelous.
