11 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Intentions are confusing; there's a lot to enjoy, though, August 26, 1999
By A Customer
I guess I'm just a big softie and a hackneyed sentimentalist, but there was something about this book that got to me. Recasting Krazy and Ignatz and hateful, hurtful people in an ugly 20th century landscape devoid of the magic and beauty that radiated around Coconino County was a real blast of cold water. I loved the opening, in which Krazy gives up comics after witnessing the first atomic bomb blast, but the outright savagery that characterizes the rest of the book wears very thin. Ignatz goes from being mischievous to being a complete bastard in no time, and his plans to shake Krazy back into work through constant humiliation and degradation are creepy. I guess the point is that our century has degenerated to the point where something as magical as "Krazy Kat" could never thrive like it did in the first half (fans ranged from James Joyce to Picasso to Woodrow Wilson). But you don't need Jay Cantor's arty postmodernist tract to tell you that. Just turn on the six o'clock news, dollin'.
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14 of 17 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Better to read the comic itself, February 27, 2001
This review is from: Krazy Kat: A Novel in Five Panels (Collier Fiction) (Paperback)
Reminiscent of Frederic Tuten's "Tintin in the New World: A Romance," Jay Cantor takes a comic long since unpublished and attempts to reinvigorate and modernize its characters in novel format. Both "Tintin" and "Krazy Kat" flirt with postmodernism. Both Tuten and Cantor soak their characters in a philosophical bath. And most notably, both authors suggest a ripe and healthy sex life would serve as the tonic for the comic characters' incompleteness, flatness.
Why do this to "Krazy Kat?" Who can tell from the insipid prose Cantor offers up in this confusing, frustrating novel? Although there were some humorous scenes in the book (notably the image of comic strip characters creating a terrorist organization in order to win the rights to themselves from Hearst), generally the book was weighed down with too much Freud, too much babble, too much abstract.
And it's nothing like the comic strip, "Krazy Kat," which was sparse, mostly silent, and dreamlike. Sure it had surrealistic scenery and an ambiguous plot, but it defied explanation, and that was where its beauty lay. Cantor, apparently oblivious to the strip's finest quality, proceeded to trample over its delicate balance by overanalying.
Don't think. You can only hurt the ballclub.
I hear Jay Cantor's "The Death of Che Guevera" is a good book.
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2 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
A slow but endearing look at what it means to be human, December 23, 2008
This is not a book for everyone. I am, admittedly, a fan of Cantor's style, so perhaps this isn't an unbiased review. Cantor's books have a way of sneaking up on you - they're kind of slow, but every sentence is a joy to read, if you enjoy good writing for the sake of good writing. In Krazy Kat in particular, I think Cantor does an excellent job of weaving theme and symbolism into something that literally is 2-dimmensional. He manages to glorify both the innocence of that simple, flat world that Kat and Ignatz live in, and the less-than-perfect but complete world that we inhabit. This is a book, for all its cartoonish presentation, about being human.
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