Cities of the Fantastic: The Invisible Frontier - Vol. 2 [Hardcover]

Francois Schuiten (Author), Benoit Peeters (Author), Joe Johnson (Translator)

Book Description

Series: Cities of the Fantastic | Publication Date: July 1, 2004

Roland, who has gone up the ranks quickly at the Center for Cartography of Sodrovno-Voldachia, cannot feel but a certain unease as to the renewed emphasis on their work brought about by the ambitious new Marshall of their country. And that girl with what seems to be a map on her lower back... The conclusion to this Cities of the Fantastic story.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Schuiten and Peeters published the first volume of this satire of political unrest in the former Yugoslavia almost two years ago. Its conclusion takes the story into even stranger territory. While volume one had a more or less linear plot, this installment dissolves that approach within a few pages, lapsing into short, dreamlike fragments. The central mystery concerns a young cartographer involved with a woman named Shkodra who has a birthmark-like map of the state of Sodrovno-Voldachhia on her buttocks (which affords Schuiten plenty of tacky artistic opportunities). Over the course of the book, the two wander through a castle filled with biological horrors, traverse forests and walls, have uneasy run-ins with military police and find themselves in increasingly fantastic landscapes, as the form of the country increasingly echoes Shkodra's body. The subtext seems to be that political revolution mangles the natural order of things, and that the shapes a cartographer follows can be transformed (as in one memorable scene where the landscape turns into an endless field of tombstones). Schuiten's artwork is exquisite: he handles the plot's slow, bizarre transformations with graceful understatement, and his meticulous colored-pencil shading gives everything a rich, weathered texture. If readers try to map the book's plot, they'll be lost. This work is meant to disturb, not to be understood.
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

From Booklist

When young Roland de Cremer returns from holiday to Sodrovno-Voldachia's desert-bound cartography center, he notices many changes and walks into another. His mentor Mister Paul is out, and he is now section manager. It's all rather intimidating but doesn't slow Roland at resuming relations with Shkodra, the prostitute with the mysterious map on her back, who has been reassigned to clerical duties. He and she immediately get into a clinch behind the center's walls of computers; he has to, uh, see the map again. Upon inspecting the model of greater Sodrovno being built to the map's specifications (shades of Andrew Crumey's mind-boggling Pfitz, 1997), Roland grows fearful for Shkodra, whose markings seem to him to negate the center's mission. He flees with her, through landscapes as architectonically dazzling as the center, to a disillusioning, ambiguous ending. The conclusion of this one of Schuiten and Peeters' Cities of the Fantastic stories can be appreciated without knowing its first volume (2003). But who would want to miss a frame of Schuiten's immaculate, surrealist-precisionist artwork? Ray Olson
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

Product Details

• Hardcover: 71 pages
• Publisher: NBM Publishing (July 1, 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 156163400X
• ISBN-13: 978-1561634002
• Product Dimensions: 11.9 x 9.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,156,362 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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