La Perdida [Hardcover]

Jessica Abel (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: March 7, 2006

From the Harvey and Lulu award–winning creator of Artbabe comes this riveting story of a young woman’s misadventures in Mexico City. Carla, an American estranged from her Mexican father, heads to Mexico City to “find herself.” She crashes with a former fling, Harry, who has been drinking his way through the capital in the great tradition of his heroes, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Harry is good—humored about Carla’s reappearance on his doorstep—until he realizes that Carla, who spends her days soaking in the city, exploring Frida Kahlo’s house, and learning Spanish, has no intention of leaving.

When Harry and Carla’s relationship of mutual tolerance reaches its inevitable end, she rejects his world of Anglo expats for her own set of friends: pretty-boy Oscar, who sells pot and dreams of being a DJ, and charismatic Memo, a left-wing, pseudo–intellectual ladies’ man. Determined to experience the real Mexico, Carla turns a blind eye to her new friends’ inconsistencies. But then she catches the eye of a drug don, el Gordo, and from that moment on her life gets a lot more complicated, and she is forced to confront the irreparable consequences of her willful innocence.

Jessica Abel’s evocative black–and–white drawings and creative mix of English and Spanish bring Mexico City’s past and present to life, unfurling Carla’s dark history against the legacies of Burroughs and Kahlo. A story about the youthful desire to live an authentic life and the consequences of trusting easy answers, La Perdida–at once grounded in the particulars of life in Mexico and resonantly universal–is a story about finding oneself by getting lost.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Starred Review. Carla Olivares, a young Mexican-American woman, goes to Mexico City to try to get in touch with her Mexican side. She's got her own, distorted ideas about what that means, and her annoyance with an old boyfriend who's leading his idea of the romantic expatriate life (by hanging out exclusively with other expats) makes her even more nervous about coming off like an outsider. She starts hanging out with a bunch of local lowlifes and blowhards who feed her guilt about being a privileged "conquistadora." They talk big (about stardom and revolution), but barely scrape by on petty crime—which eventually becomes not so petty, and sucks Carla into a vortex of fear and violence. Abel's published several books of her shorter comics stories, but for her first long-form graphic novel she's developed a new, impressively assured style, built around bold, rough brushstrokes. She's got a telegraphic command of body language—her characters' faces are simplified to the point where their eyes are usually just dots—and the backgrounds nicely evoke the architecture and heat of Mexico City. What really makes the story compelling, though, is Abel's sensitivity to character and dialogue—Carla is the narrator, but she's hardly a heroine, and the way crucial meanings are lost in translation ratchets up the dramatic tension. (Mar.)
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From School Library Journal

Grade 10 Up–Twenty-something American slacker Carla moves to Mexico, land of her long-lost father. She crashes at the apartment of her ex-boyfriend, a wealthy, WASPy American who socializes mostly with people like himself. Carla soon meets some locals, wannabe revolutionary Memo and wannabe DJ Oscar. After moving in with Oscar, she becomes less engaged in society, rarely interacting outside of this limited group. As she becomes even less involved, her naïveté allows some horrible events to occur. While readers see the writing on the wall long before Carla catches on, she is still a sympathetic heroine. This is Abels first full-length graphic novel after her Artbabe comic and collections (Fantagraphics), and its both simple and ambitious. The black-and-white artwork is sketchy, but evocative. The story is intricately plotted and suspenseful. The decision to write the first chapters dialogue in Spanish, translated at the bottom of the panels, is interesting. Later, when Spanish is spoken predominantly, all of the dialogue is in English, putting words that were actually spoken in English in brackets. This not only reflects Carlas move into Spanish, but also allows readers to feel more strongly her lack of knowledge upon arriving in Mexico. The lengthy glossary defines Spanish words, phrases, vulgarities, and characters and places referenced in the text. Abel has successfully portrayed characters both on the fringes of society, and those who wish that they were.–Jamie Watson, Harford County Public Library, MD
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 288 pages
• Publisher: Pantheon; English edition (March 7, 2006)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375423656
• ISBN-13: 978-0375423659
• Product Dimensions: 6.8 x 1.1 x 8.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 3.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (15 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #620,007 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

17 of 19 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essential, April 23, 2006

By 

Guy L. Gonzalez "Malcontent" (Bloomfield, NJ) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: La Perdida (Hardcover)

Jessica Abel crams heaping handfuls of story into each chapter of her gripping tale of self-discovery and self-deceit, an excellent, completely engaging and essential graphic novel that belongs on every discerning comics fans' bookshelf.

Carla, Abel's titular "la perdida" -- lost girl -- is a half-Mexican twenty-something who moves to Mexico City on a whim, looking to get in touch with her Mexican roots by fully immersing herself in the culture, quickly rejecting her fellow American expatriates in favor of two natives who (with a peculiar mix of selfish sincerity) embrace her: Memo, a Communist pseudo-intellectual, and Oscar, his good-looking if somewhat simple-minded friend. The first three chapters are Carla's story of trying to fit in and find her place in a culture that is completely foreign to her and not always welcoming, despite and in spite of her half-Mexican blood, and Abel does an excellent job of establishing a rather large cast of supporting characters so that in the fourth chapter, when things take a dramatic shift that in lesser hands would qualify as jumping the shark, she's able (no pun intended) to pull it off without derailing everything that's come before. Because she tells the story from Carla's perspective looking back on what happened, the reader is cued into details that Carla herself is missing at the time, so as events unfolded, I found myself cringing at some of her choices while always remaining engaged with her story. When it ended, somewhat abruptly, I found my head spinning a bit, chock full of images and anecdotes from Carla's experience as if she had shared them with me personally over coffee.

Abel's artwork, dense and subtly detailed, took about 15 pages for me to get used to before I was fully drawn into the story, as the back-and-forth prologue and discordant opening sequence forced my eyes to linger on each panel much longer than I'm used to doing. There's also the Spanish-English translation that crowds many of the panels in the first chapter which adds to its density -- and also helps non-Spanish readers, myself included, to further identify with Carla's situation -- but the extra effort is rewarded throughout the story, and it quickly becomes clear why it took five years to finish the story because there's not a single wasted panel in it. Like Blankets, the first long-form (non-superhero) graphic novel to really blow me away, and Black Hole, the most recent one to do so, La Perdida is everything great sequential art should be.

8 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not bad, but not brilliant, July 20, 2006

By 

MT "huckfinn246" (Princeton, NJ) - See all my reviews

This review is from: La Perdida (Hardcover)

I read and heard a couple rave reviews about La Perdida, but I have to say I was disappointed. I speak Spanish and have spent time in Mexico City, so I agree that Abel gets a lot of the details right, but I found that the characters were types who didn't really develop. That is, I'm sure, part of what Abel wanted to convey...characters trapped in an approach to life without much insight into themselves or others, so it's possible I had the wrong expectations for La Perdida. The book does effectively show a woman struggling to find herself and does make make us wonder about how many women form relationships with men with so little insight into the power they give up and the jerks the guys are. But, overall, I think that creating a lurid comic book surface was a way to avoid developing fully human characters having real interactions. But, it's a pretty good graphic novel. You might enjoy the movie "Y Tu Mama Tambien" by Alfonso Cuaron if you want drugs, sex and swearing, but also insight into human characters and a brilliantly vivid picture of Mexico.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A rich exploration of the intertwining of two vastly different cultures, November 24, 2009

By 

GraphicNovelReporter.com (New York, NY) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: La Perdida (Paperback)

The quest to find one's self--that mythical, magical journey of self-discovery--is difficult enough in the country in which you were born. For Carla, our narrator and tour guide in Jessica Abel's La Perdida, it's an impossibility. Her personal journey leads her to Mexico City, a whirlwind of artistic and political endeavors, intense poverty and wealth, and the crime and drug use that spring up around both. It's also home to more than a few young American expatriates.

When Carla arrives in town, she is, in theory, just there to visit her ex-boyfriend, Harry, and enjoy a short vacation. Carla, half-Mexican by birth but entirely American in lifestyle and attitude, doesn't quite fit in in this strange new land, but she knows she wants to be there. She overstays her visa, frustrating Harry, who is more than ready to see his houseguest leave.Carla is a clueless, blundering tourist when she first arrives, unable to speak Spanish and unaware of how she and her fellow Americans are viewed by the locals. She's also a bit childish, selfishly overextending her stay with Harry without permission or invitation and remaining completely nonplussed at his many entreaties for her to leave. She's more interested in boorishly studying (and attempting to emulate) Frida Kahlo than becoming truly acquainted with the culture she now finds herself living in.

That quickly changes, mostly because Carla is, in ways she cannot fully comprehend, completely ready to change. She learns Spanish, finds her own apartment and meets her own friends--native citizens who educate her on Mexico's ways but may also be the wrong crowd to fall in with. There's Oscar, the drug-dealing hunk who becomes Carla's boyfriend; Memo, an outspoken cad who tries to woo Carla while also criticizing her capitalist upbringing; and, ultimately, el Gordo, leader of a drug business and a man with dangerous plans.

Carla doesn't realize just how deep she has fallen into trouble until it's far too late, and it's a testament to Abel's slow styling that we the readers don't either. An opening prelude warns us of what kind of tale to expect, but after that, Abel takes her time settling in, building up Carla's persona not only as a lost soul but as foolish, impulsive and headstrong. When she comes to see herself as she truly is (and all that she has become), we feel we've earned the journey along with her.

La Perdida is a rich exploration of the intertwining of two vastly different cultures joined by geography and circumstance yet existing worlds apart. Carla tries to find her place in this society, debating sociopolitical circumstances with Mexicans and Americans alike, never quite realizing just where all this blind ambition to fit in is leading her. That's the problem with coming of age: The person you ultimately turn into may not be who you wished you could be. La Perdida captures that poignancy brilliantly.

-- John Hogan