Customer Reviews

La Perdida

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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.

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.

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

I am a fan of indie comics (that is, not superhero stuff-Persepolis, Blankets, Peepshow, etc), so I was very excited to find La Perdida, especially because it was done by a woman. The artwork is sumptuous: rough brushwork, great expressions, evocative landscapes, especially the view of Mexico City on page129. Hats off to Ms Abel for this.

The story is what's lacking. While artfully executed, the story halts occasionally because there are no indications of scene changes, or even flashbacks for that matter. While most of the time I can intuit this, I really stumbled in through the beginning when more flashbacks were employed. Then, I have to chime in with previous reviewers. It is incredibly frustrating reading about a main character, Carla, who has no self-respect nor awareness, and does nothing but unwittingly sabotage herself (and others). The men she chooses for her friendships and relationships are all fairly abusive (verbally); they clearly don't respect her. She chooses the crowd she does simply to compensate her overwhelming lack of identity. (She loves Frida Kahlo, but when her new Mexican friends mock Frida, Carla rips her poster of Frida down!) While that's fine okay in a coming-of-age story, there is NO redemption. You do not feel as if she's learned from her mistakes. She recognizes she's messed up, but in the end, she's simply wondering where her innocence (read stupidity) went!

This is incredibly frustrating. The events of the story are interesting; the characters, if a bit one-note, provide a fascinating point of view (for a capitalist American like me). And if nothing else, the setting is stunning. Abel's images of the city and foliage are gorgeous.

But this isn't a graphic novel I would recommend to first-time comics readers.

Jessica Abel, La Perdida (Pantheon, 2006)

I'm still not sure exactly what to think of La Perdida a week after I finished it. For some reason, I had it in my head that it was a graphic-novel memoir, rather than actually being a novel, in the "fiction" sense of the term, and so I ended up getting a tad confused in the early going. That, obviously, is not at all Jessica Abel's fault, and once I had my head cleared out, I got back on track, and away we went.

La Perdida is the story of Carla, a half-Mexican woman who wants to get in touch with her roots (or whatever the kids are calling it these days), and she does so by abandoning her family and running off to Mexico with very little in the way of a plan. She crashes at the home of an ex-boyfriend for "a few days;" once that turns into months, tempers flare, and Carla drops the ex and his detached-expatriate crowd in favor of some of the natives, notably old communist womanizer Memo and his companion Oliver. She soon finds out, however, that her ideas about living the native life may have been a touch on the naive side.

It's an interesting story, though there are a few times when the pacing could have been better. Carla, as a protagonist, inspires equal parts sympathy and contempt, an interesting combination. The more I think about it, the more accomplished it is. There's still the problem that I ended up not really caring about the characters-- they're well-drawn, but not terribly interesting when all is said and done-- but this is certainly an interesting beginning to what I assume will be Abel's career in full-length graphic novels. ***

La Perdida is a richly layered coming of age story based upon a young woman, Carla, backpacking to Mexico City to discover her 'authentic' Mexican roots. The distinction between the 'tourist' and the 'traveller' is explored in the various communities inhabiting Mexico City: the 'ex-pat' world and its varieties, the familial world of Mexico, the world of criminals and 'revolutionaries'. Carla's experience of the tension between 'authenticity' and human solidarity is one of the novel's key motivations expressed through 'romantic' entanglements (blurred with the culture of the 'hook up') and the kidnapping plot, culminating in Carla's more sympathetic understanding of Harry by the end. The arrival of Carla's brother Rod is a catalyst which increases these thematic tensions, e.g. as he has never visited Mexico and yet is still 'more authentically' Mexican despite this inconvenient fact. Relationships shift as people discover the world: conflict and discovery means letting some people go, or transforming existing ones, such as with Carla and her roomate Liana. The references to William S. Burroughs were thought-provoking and interweaved various themes of the story, involving not only Carla but implicating the author as well, though La Perdida is not autobiographical. The attention to cultural detail and 'youth culture' is terrific, and there is a dictionary in the back which especially assists with idiomatic usages. The graphic novel form, with a black and white and panel technique reminiscent of Maus, is well-used to depict the nuances which wouldn't be available in written form, e.g. 'reading' expressions on character's faces, but dialogue remains a key component of the story architecture.

La Perdida is recommended reading for tourists and travellers of all ages, in lands foreign and domestic, and all those journeying through life.

For what it's worth, I'm related to Jessica Abel. If that thought suggests to you that I am trying to elevate her rating on Amazon, well, take my review with as many grains of salt as you'd like. I am not particularly close to her, although she answers my e-mail within a reasonable time when I write to her :).

I was not immediately aware that Abel had released this book and finally, for any number of reasons, only finished it a week ago. Regardless, it is a very interesting take on self-discovery and the tension between self-confidence and an openness to the world. It is the story of Carla, a young Mexican-American who speaks almost no Spanish and, planning only to stay with an ex in Mexico City for a little while, ends up caught up in serious criminal activity and with a much more nuanced understanding of what it means to know oneself and where one comes from. Abel combines genres as few are able (no pun intended) or willing to do and I think she does it largely successfully. I would say I found it a little difficult to believe that a girl as intelligent as Carla is, who learns Spanish in fairly short order and who works almost from the start as an ESL teacher in Mexico City, is still so stupid that she allows herself to be conned by some of the rather shallow, elementary arguments against US economic and cultural imperialism to which she does allow herself to held hostage to. That is not to say that the US does not have policies and ideas which it should not be ashamed of. It just seemed clear to me-perhaps owing to the fact that I am a little older than Carla-that the arguments against economic and, to some degree cultural, imperialism, were not really policies to which she subscribed or supported. She engages with people who have varying degrees of sincerity about the imperialism of the US and it's obvious-she interacts with "regular" Mexicans, learns Spanish in the city, lives with a Mexico City native-that she is more than interested in seeing how regular folks live and not sealing herself off from the everyday experience a la her ex-Harry. Yet she allows them to suggest that she is one of the purveyors and a prime example, of the sort of imperialism which she clearly separates herself from. That said.......exploring the challenge of finding the appropriate balance of involvement in a society foreign to oneself and retaining one's own identity is a tough thing to do and Abel does it quite well.

I am not a connoisseur of comics although I have found myself more interested in recent years, but I would imagine that Abel is among a tiny number of those able to explore such themes so masterfully in the indie comic world. Her drawing is beautiful, capturing the broad cityscape, the close encounter, and what was always impressive to me, the lingering feeling. When Carla had a strong feeling-the sort that you have and that you let come out and it lingers-Abel draws Carla having the sort of dreamlike gaze that overcomes one at a time like that. This emotion is conveyed via the glazed-eye look for a couple of panels.

This book would be interesting I think, to anyone who has parents of different racial backgrounds, one of which they may feel less connected to. The storytelling, and Abel's ear for dialogue and empathy for motivation, would make this book attractive to anyone. The limning of the human desire to know oneself and the complexity of doing so, make this a fascinating book.

La Perdida has complex issues of identity and culturally themes that many people born in one country from immigrant parents from other country, might be able to relate to, feeling of lost or undeclared identity. In this case, Carla the protagonist, a Mexican-American born, takes a journey through exploring and taking in the cultural blend of the entire city of Mexico City. During her journey, she desires to embody a true and authentic Mexican experience, which leads to some complicated turn of events that are as out of control as the traffic in Mexico City.
Carla goes to Mexico City, hardy knowing any spanish, only one famous female Mexican artist, an ex-boyfriend from the U.S, and nothing else beside that she wants to surround herself with Mexico. She arrives to Mexico meeting and staying with an ex-boyfriend, Harry, which does not have the same interests as Carla of submerging herself in the Mexican culture. She wishes to learn more Spanish, have Mexican friends, and leave her American views and way of thinking out the door, which leads to a wrong turn. Carla makes new Mexican friends, Memo and Oscar, two people that will lead her into a major traffic jam. Choosing to be part of the wrong crowd, Carla gets into drugs, helps sells knock-off shirts, and has a conspiracy report of the ransom of her ex-boyfriend Harry. She is later repents having these new Mexican friends, and leaves the Mexico City and heads home to Chicago, where she feels like she is an exile, because of threats from the ransom group back in Mexico. Through this experience, Carla engulf herself a great deal, losing track on her actual purpose of her journey, which was to find your cultural identity in Mexico.
Some aspects of Carla's characteristics and responses to certain events have a naïve reaction, which may be view as a disapproving part of her character. At the beginning of La Perdida, Carla was enjoying herself in a new city, visiting all the touristy places that Mexico City has to offer; one of them being Frida Kahlos house. Once she arrived to the Frida museum, she was happy and fully enthusiastic, but once she started to hang our with her new Mexican friends, who deny Frida Kahlo popularity, she too jumped on the bandwagon. She also gets irritated with her American friends, because they don't have any Mexican friends or like to do anything "Mexican". Carla can play off as poser, who thinks she is better than her American friends because she has Mexican friends and has an earning to learn about the Mexican culture. Other than her pretending to be better than some people, Carla is generally good character with moral but picks the wrong friends.
At the end, I truly enjoy reading Jessica Abel's La Perdida, because of my connection to the main character. Being a Mexican-American, I could understand how you could feel like a tourist in the country of your parents, since you didn't have the same experience as others. I love how Carla really wanted to have an authentic experience in Mexico and find herself through the cultural identity of a city. I would recommend this book to anyone who wants to see great sequential art and enjoy a trip to Mexico City.

The Mexican setting is interesting, and the story is ok, if self-indulgent and not remarkable. But the main character is consistently annoying and it grows hard to sympathize with someone so shallow, self-hurting and unaware. Furthermore, the cover is the only part of the book that shows real penmanship... Browse through it before buying.

The protagonist is the epitome of the "oblivious gringa" that travels
half a world away (in her mind) to Mexico (3rd world country
nonetheless) to "find herself". Wearing her half-mexican mask and
claiming to be better than her ex, just cuz she wants to get to know
the people and the culture, I find this character not only annoying,
but completely undeserving of any sympathy. The whole story is filled
with self-indulgent and forgettable events, only to come back to the
US feeling bad about her little escapade. The only satisfying feature
of this comic is that is short. I hope she stays lost.