Customer Reviews

Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

A "knipl" is colloquial Yiddish for a secret stash, like money saved for a rainy day or some last relic of an old way of life. Those populating the unnamed city of Ben Katchor's extended graphic novel are essentially gripped by nostalgia for a way of life that probably never existed. In cartoon vignettes, they pine for the days when you could visit the famed "Pygmy Penitentiary" (attempted breakouts scheduled every hour) and pick up some of Virosh Sherue's bottled rain water on the way home. Many try to preserve their way of life, if only because they fear change ("Static Day" is an official holiday) and grab a hold on the present as if it were a lifeline (one man has dozens of items on lay-away in stores thruought the city, because the goods are kept perpetually new until he has to pick them up). And the city doesn't lack for opportunists - like street toughs who scavenge TV antennae from buildings that have gone cable; tour operators who bus tourists through the decayed parts of the city (the driver soon becomes the primaddona) or show biz operators who conceive of turning manual labor into public spectacle. For much of the city, it's business as usual as reporters for the vile evening combinator scour the city for tales of the dreams of its populace, or as bra-strap statisticians try to chart the rise and fall of the city's fortunes. The titular real estate photographer notes all dispassionately. Katchor parodies and mourns his citizens at the same time, yet he never condescends to them not tries to milk them for tears. Instead, Katchor, through the lens of his alter ego, a real estate photographer seems to have mastered the perfect balance of bittersweet, a quest that, for his charachters, seems one more casualty lost to the years.

Julius Knipl: Real Estate Photographer Stories is a collection of Ben Katchor's comics about about middle-class guys in New York City. At first glance each comic (usually 4 or 8 panels) seems to have no point, and the tone tends to remind me of the Jim books (I Made Some Brownies, And They Were Pretty Good, etc.), but Katchor seems to have staked out some pretty bizarre literary territory with these little stories.

One of my favorites concerns a man who is nearly poked in the eye with an umbrella on a rainy day. He's telling a companion his story, when a bystander overhears and tells him that many city residents are actually suffering from eye injuries on a day like this. This eye-injury enthusiast takes our man to the hospital, to see him "offer condolences to the families of the injured."

Another story concerns a group of volunteers who man phone lines all night, just to take calls from concerned citizens who have heard fire engine or ambulance sirens. Lots of the stories are about businessmen with bizarre, pathetic, or just loopy invention ideas: a suitcase that turns into a wastebasket, a storefront which sells rock candy, but only wholesale...

The text is punctuated by hilarious proper names, such as:

Blood & Sawdust Brand Cirkus Straws

The Ascending Colon, with Horace Bismuth and Vivian Scybala

Citric Acid Council

Viosh Shirue's Natural Rainwater Cistern

Katchor doesn't look down at his characters or approach them with anything similar to condescension. If I am motivated to feel anything at all after reading this, it's a bit more humility and compassion for my fellow man. At times these little stories are laugh-aloud funny, but mostly they just bring a smile and a little chuckle.

I am glad I ran across this book.

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And yes, these pieces were not created to be consumed en masse. If you find a few amusing or worthwhile, but they get tiresome after a bit, just put the book down, and read a few of them each day, as you would if your daily newspaper carried them.

Ben Katchor's eerie cityscapes evoke the ruins of the kind of world that appeared to be happening in the background of 1950's films noir, and his fanciful industries, charities, and fraternal organizations hearken back to the same imagined time. Reading his work, one becomes nostalgic for a time that never existed. This form of humor is subtle. In fact, it is not the humor for which I buy Katchor's work as much as it is for that strange feeling of fictional nostalgia. You can get humor anywhere, but Katchor's world view is unique to the man himself. If you ever get jaded, remember this review: immersing yourself in a book of Katchor's is unlike anything you've ever felt before.

I first heard about Ben Katchor when one of his strips had been dramatised on NPR's Weekend Edition. I was leaving Hot Springs, AR enroute for my home off the Jersey Turnpike and had just crossed out of Tennessee when the thickly accented voice of a Brooklynite seaped into the monotony of my drive. An old-time radio serial style program about N.Y.? It was so well-done, I looked for Katchor's collections but it wasn't until 2 and a half years later I found this one in Boston. It's beautiful and poignant, moving in the same rhythms of reading the estate sale announcements, collecting matchbooks and scraps of handwritten notes found in gutters and on sidewalks, assembling lives out of slow, unwitting forgetfulness. The smell of your hands after touching old quilts and photographs, the insides of old coffee tins, the way the light is in thrift stores from Vermont to Flagstaff to Portland, OR. I'm always entranced by slow decay and memory persistent in the manufactured world, preserved by the eccentric, nomadic, relentless, and discontent. This collection is necessary for illuminating the vague sensations of nostalgia and regret we experience, yet these stories are frequently undergirded by Katchor's calm Jewish faith. If this book pleases you, try and find Jem Cohen's documentary film, "Lost Book Found" which coincides nicely with Katchor's work (indeed, they thank each other in their credits). This book is most strongly recommended

these haunting stories are a notch above the first julius knipl book. one can only wonder where katchor is taking us with this series. his comic stories bounce around between the panels and the reader is forced to create other stories that are only hinted at on the page. it's totally beautiful. great book for anyone into old new york, american yiddishkeit, or gorgeous comics.

It's like a hilarious dream that makes perfect sense but you can't explain it, and it permeates your whole day. You have to put the book down and stare into space every little chunk or so. It's rich. I can't explain it. There's probably a German word for it.

This is just about my favorite book. I read the review in the New York Times, which was a rave. I went out and bought it, struggled with the panels at first, but once I got the hang of how to read the narrative along with the inter-woven dialogue, I was simply entranced. Katchor's world is the world I imagine my father grew up in -- the big noisy depression-era city. Katchor has an almost surreal ability to see how unrelated events and moments are connected. Each page is a wonderfully crafted short story, and each panel drawing is packed with humor and nuance, almost as if it were itself drawn by one of Katchor's fallen characters.

But the Julius Knipl graphic stories surely are. They are not remotely like anything else I've ever seen. If Franz Kafka had had a sense of humor, and had been able to draw, he might have created something like this. Not all of the strips will make you laugh; some will make you wonder, "What was that all about?" -- and then you'll want to read them again. A strange collection, and not for all tastes, but for those who find these stories compelling, it's a must-own item.

I lived in New York between 1986 and 1989. Knipl's city is that city as much as it is the "Depression Era" city of a reader below's father. Katchor manages to draw timeless landscapes, give voice to people who are eternally present and asks us to dwell on topics that we would ordinarily focus on only in passing, if at all.

Perhaps those who find his strip tiresome and/or irritating are those people who never think about what happens to calendar salesmen in February and simply don't care when given the opportunity. NPR was forced to stop broadcasting "Julius Knipl" because of an avalanche of complaints from the listening audience.

If you have no use for or interest in the humanity that lives and works beyond the numbered avenues that are considered so important that they had to be given names too, then this book is not for you.

Sometimes the lack of critical distance in online reviews compels me to chip in with a two-star spoiler, if only to temper the five stars rashes that seem to be endemic. When first viewed, Katchor's work has an engagingly ethereal quality: crude yet strikingly filmic illustrations are underpinned by liltingly meandering Magic Realist musings. After a few pages, however, the subtle charm becomes smug, narrative rhythms begin to seem like simple repetitiveness and the whole enterprise appears flimsy and self-satisfied. I realise that these are separate newspaper strips not originally intended for consumption en masse but I still found the collection as a whole to be disappointing and ultimately rather irritating.