Customer Reviews

Ordinary Victories

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

 

 

I didn't expect this much beauty and feeling from a small graphic novel, so this book was much more than I anticipated. I was pleasantly surprised by the touching story line. The graphics are beautiful.

I don't usually take time to review books I read unless there is really something special about them. This is absolutely one of those books.
Right now I'm reading it for the second time and enjoying it even more than I did the first time. The pictures are really beautiful and so simple. After having finished it the first time I remember crying because I had been so touched. The story is simple. It is so every day and probably speaks to something within everyones life. I'm most impressed with the artwork and the truly authentic as well as humorous at time, dialogues and relationships that unfold within the story.
A real gem to read and re-read.

This full-color French graphic novel takes 20-something slacker ennui and tries to milk it for all its worth -- which probably goes a long way to explaining why it won the grand prize at Angouleme (kind of the Cannes Film Festival of European comics). The story is about Marc, a disillusioned young photographer who suffers from anxiety attacks and leaves the big city (and therapy) for the simpler life of a small country farmhouse. Stripping his life down to the bare bones (no job, cozy house, companion cat, Playstation, plenty of pot), he gets comfortable. And when he meets a cute veterinarian things seem even better. But Marc is trying to run away from life's complexities, and has a hard time dealing with and accepting change. His search for a new photography project frustrates him, as does his girlfriend's gentle prods toward a longer-term relationship, not to mention his semi-estranged father's severe decline in health.

The book feels quite a bit like a well-intentioned but somewhat uncohesive indie film. All manner of ideas are raised: the struggle of the artist not to stagnate, Marc's relationship with his more settled-down brother and his beur (French-born Arab) wife, the emotional toll of seeing one's parents age, the inability to commit to someone who loves you, the insincerity of the contemporary art scene, etc. Via a background election, the book also attempts to bring up politics, class, and ethnicity, but for the most part this is all rather nebulously handled. There is one good scene where self-righteously liberal Marc gets in an argument with one of the shipyard workers because he voted far-right, despite working with, and being friends with immigrants. There's also a rather curious subplot involving a charming old fisherman, who happens to have been a war buddy of Marc's father (here, it helps to understand that "the war" that is referred to is the 1954-62 Algerian War of Independence and it helps to know a little about how that played out).

The problem is that there's just too much crammed in. The story would have benefited from spending more time on fewer of these issues and treating them slightly more in depth. For example, Marc's "creative struggle" isn't particularly compelling, indeed it's hard to sympathize too much with a photographer who's been so successful that he can take a year (or more) off to just go live in the country, take long walks, and smoke hash. Similarly, his commitment issues with his outrageously patient girlfriend, while handled nicely, doesn't take the reader anywhere new or interesting. The subplot with the old fisherman has potential, but is rests on a shaky foundation of a rather large coincidence. Larcenet has some decent ideas, and handles certain scenes and emotions very very well, but his ambitions overwhelm his storytelling and focus. His dialogue is remarkably good, very realistic and affecting -- and very, very well translated.

The artwork is quite nice in kind of a classically French cartoon sense. There are the flourishes one often sees in European work, such as hugely phallic or dagger-like noses, pupil-less eyes, and so forth. But these aren't as distracting and grotesque as some other artists, and the coloring by Larcenet's brother is excellent. Overall, probably worth checking out if you're into overseas comics but not nearly as compelling as its prize-winning pedigree might suggest.

Ordinary Victories is the story of a photographer named Marc who has to overcome his creator's block, his own sense of alienation, the very prospect of his parents' deaths as well as the stress and neuroses that fills modern life and his own idiosyncratic one. It might not sound like much of a story. In fact, it sounds very simple and straightforward by comparison to other plots. But it isn't.

Marc is in a state of ennui, debilitating panic attacks and transformation. He is not happy with his life and he hides this unhappiness initially by going all over the world and taking photographs of people far worse off than him: transforming this impulse into art. But when this fails him and he finds himself in a romantic relationship, he realizes he is in the process of change. In the background of this story, set in France, is also the still very real ghost of the French-Algerian War. It affects his brother who is married to an Algerian woman, his father who had been a soldier in that war, the very politics of France as the right-wing are depicted coming into power, and even Marc himself when he realizes some stark truths about some of the people he gets to know and also himself and his own views on life: namely, his sheer terror of it. Marc ends up having to make some decisions about what it is really important in his existence and just what kind of art he wants to depict from his own life.

Ordinary Victories was originally split into two separate books, but here they are united into the single narrative that they are. Sometimes, the translation from its original French is a little choppy but all in all it portrays what is going on very well. Readers might be confused by references to French and Continental art and philosophy. Certainly, I was confused by a section in which various profiles of famous people are depicted. I still do not know who they all are and their presence is not explained but placed there as what seems to be a given: as something the reader-audience should know already from cultural exposure.

However, the art is excellent. Manu Larcenet seemingly takes a cue from Herge and creates very elemental cartoon figures that have very specific and distinctive features. The colourist Patrice Larcenet is also brilliant at using bright colours and different shades of colour. Two scenes come to mind where Marco is talking with his brother and his father outside and you can see that even while they retain their cartoonish shapes, the light and shadow plays on them as they would any shape in our own three-dimensional world. There is a definite focal point in the work between the realistic and the iconic that functions well. The black and red jagged depiction of Marc's own panic attacks are well done too: leaving you with that feeling of just how jarring they are and why he needs to arrange his life around their awfulness.

I'm not sure if the origins of Marc's attacks are ever really explained, and the ending of the entire story does seem very abrupt somehow, but in some ways it also works out in a way. I think the best way that this work can be summed up is with the quote that Larcenet uses at the beginning of the book: "You could not say they were slaves / But from there to say they lived ..." This phrase itself says a lot about society and though I wonder at the translation as well, it does suit the content and structure of this book. I can see why it won the top award in the Angouleme comics event and it is definitely worth reading.

great potrayal of angst and neurosis that keeps us awake at night. more than a year after reading this, i am ready for a re-read. a gem of a graphic novel, even in translation. like a perfect movie by an artiste like godard or truffaut, this one is a perfect graphic novel by a french writer.

It's easy to think of "Ordinary Victories" as "Doug" (the old Nickelodeon animated feature) grown up and gone to seed. The artist draws the characters whose air of comic innocence and forgiveness that might lead you to believe that this is a work to be dismissed. But from the first page, where we meet our young, confused photographer-protagonist trying to break of sessions with his rather useless psychotherapist, author Manu Larcenet explores humanity's search for meaning and value.

The story is set in beautiful countryside of France in the present. Marc lives alone in an old farmhouse, and has a bachelor's maddening neuroses and self-defeating attitudes. He is prone to debilitating panic attacks that he cannot predict or understand, but that has learned to live with. He smokes constantly, can't seems to find his own artistic voice, is self-absorbed and fearful about change. He does have an eye for photography, but seeks a change from photographing violent conflicts. Marc's character features and flaws set up most of the drama in the work, from confrontations with his newly-found-veterinarian-girlfriend, to the gun-toting nut patrolling his property, to his amiable-if-secretive parents, to his party-hearty brother, to his irritable cat Adolf, to the seemingly-benign old man who lives in an old mill and spends his days fishing. Each character has a story and a secret, which Marc reacts to with sometimes ridiculous exaggeration. "Ordinary Victories" is about the slow motion progress of a human being to deal with family, death and one's own place in the world. It is about the little insults that shape us and mold our characters. It is about love, commitment, and maturity. It does not end on a note of completion, but on the observation that human growth is slow, life is complicated, and insights are few and hard to read.

Quite a bit of material for a comic book, n'est-ce-pas?

A book about emotional growth and acceptance, rendered in an appealing and colorful style. I found myself laughing aloud at times, tearing up at others.