There are times, in the life of a critic, when one hears about a book whose premise is so bizarre – so daft, so brash, so shameless – that one must immediately get a copy. Precisely this occurred over the summer, when your friendly neighbourhood Books Editor got wind that Seagull Books had been publishing graphic novel adaptations of authors like Proust, Joyce, Musil, Bernhard. This sounded absolutely stupid – not just normal stupid, but laugh-out-loud stupid, like a piece of online engagement bait designed to lure literary snobs out of their hidey-holes so they can be harangued. Ulysses? In Search of Lost Time?? These are works whose achievements lie not in plot but in what they do with interiority and language. You would have to be bananas to try and make these into comics.
Thankfully, as it turns out, Nicholas Mahler is exactly the right kind of bananas. Since 2011, the prizewinning Austrian cartoonist and writer – an autodidact who started working as an illustrator immediately after high school – has been publishing a series of literary adaptations that are more like variations in the jazz sense: book-length art riffs on author and work. (His Proust and Carroll adaptations are respectively subtitled “nach” and “frei nach”, i.e. loosely based on the canonical texts; his Kafka, out this year from Pushkin Press, is a “comic biography”.)
They are witty, wise and surprisingly moving: a highly thoughtful playtime in the sandpit called canon.
In each, Mahler finds a style that suits his subject – and his own thematic preoccupations. His Ulysses, lovingly rendered in Irish green and transposed to a Viennese setting, splashes its narrator’s meandering thoughts and fixations across each scene. The Proust adaptation is sometimes purply lavish and sometimes whitely spare, as it conjures the luxurious and gossipy – yet often stiffly lonesome – world of its author. With great resourcefulness, Mahler develops a rich visual language for the Proustian layering and twisting of time, for the melancholy working of memory, and for the intersubjective limits on what one sees and one remembers.
Thomas Bernhard’s Old Masters, a tragicomic monologue novel that stars a disillusioned octogenarian sitting in a Viennese art museum, is perhaps his most impressive adaptation. (This one is translated by James Reidel, the other two by Berliner Alexander Booth). Vienna’s black-white-gold visual grandeur is pasted over with strips of Bernhardian soliloquy; the old man’s ranting pushes the illustration into digressions, obsessions and moments of bathos. “We are fascinated by a work of art and in the end it is only ridiculous,” he concludes, as Mahler’s frames accompany the narrative’s shifts between philosophical grumbling and deeply human pathos. One misses the breathlessness of Bernhard’s original prose – but this too provides another clever frame to a novel whose theme is proximity to genius.
These books are best approached not as a time-saving lifehack alternative to the literary greats, but with an abundance mindset and a little tongue-in-cheek. They are witty, wise and surprisingly moving: a highly thoughtful playtime in the sandpit called canon. Mahler’s cheekiness, too, is excellently suited to his authors: Kafka, Bernhard, and Joyce were themselves highly irreverent when it came to their forefathers. “Only when we unswervingly come to the realisation that there isn’t this whole or perfect thing,” says the museum grouch in Old Masters, “do we have a possibility of survival”. Or one might rather heed the words of a different leading light, Tenacious D, and remember that – even if this isn’t the greatest book in the world – we can still enjoy the tribute.
