Stitches: A Memoir by David Small

If you have ever questioned whether graphic novels can be as poignant and powerful as traditional novels or memoirs, Stitches proves that they can. In fact, I don’t think David Small’s memoir could be told as powerfully in any other format.

David’s mother was a “difficult” person to live with, and everyone in the house retreated into their own forms of silence. Tragically and ironically, David is left a virtual mute at the age of fourteen after what he thought would be a simple operation to remove a cyst in his throat. It was cancer, but no one thought he needed to know that. As his family crumbles under his mother’s austere dictatorship and his father’s belief that he gave David the cancer, David finds his voice through art and escapes the mental illness that seems to haunt his mother’s side of the family.

The simple artwork captures the mood of the Small family perfectly. Pages will go by without a word, beautifully capturing the silence and agony David was experiencing. It would take pages and pages of text to describe what Small is able to express in a few simply rendered panels.

This is a great graphic novel and memoir.

Another great ARC from ijustfinished.com

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Pygmy by Chuck Palahniuk

Pygmy is advertised as “The Manchurian Candidate meets South Park.” If I had to put definitive numbers to that statement, I would say the book is 95 percent South Park. This satire is chocked full of good ‘ole 13-year-old-American-male humor, which is what will either make the reader love it or hate it. But before you can do either, you’ll have to figure out how to read the damn thing.

The book is narrated in the first person dispatches of a teenage terrorist from a unnamed Asian country who is in the U.S. as part of a student exchange program. He’s here with several other undercover agents to unleash a massive attack on civilians. He speaks in a stereotypical broken English with lots of cliche, communist-totalitarian-like phrases. If you can get used to Pygmy’s phrasing, it almost becomes poetic later in the book. Until then it’s just annoying.

Pygmy, like all of Palahniuk’s novels, makes some very general insights into how American society is degenerate, hypocritical, and weak-minded. Nothing new. It also includes tons of cartoonish violence and sex, including a teenage boy brutally raping another teenage boy in the bathroom at Walmart and a school shooting. Cartoonish is the key word. Otherwise it would be unreadable. Think Borat (which I cut off halfway through the movie).

Chuck Palahniuk’s Fight Club set him up to be a promising literary star for the new century. In my opinion, he hasn’t lived up to that literary potential at all, but Palahniuk has a devoted following that would certainly disagree with me. It seems that every book since Fight Club has tried to top the last in shock value and inventiveness, which suggests he’s writing for pure entertainment value. Pulp is not bad for pulp’s sake, but it’s not art. I still have hope, the audacity. I have one more Palahniuk book on the shelf to read. It’s like tonguing a sore tooth. It hurts, but I keep doing it.

Cutting For Stone by Abraham Verghese

The magic of a good book is that it takes you on a journey and you feel as if you have lived vicariously through the characters.  Cutting for Stone is that kind of book.  The narrator and protagonist, Marion Stone, recounts his life story starting with his mother, an Indian nun, and his father, a British doctor, meeting on a boat from India to Yemen. The majority of the book takes place in Ethiopia as Marion and his twin brother survive a precarious birth and come of age living at “Missing” hospital in the Ethiopian highlands.  He later travels to the U.S. to finish his surgical education in a ghetto hospital.

Verghese, a doctor of internal medicine and pulmonary and infectious diseases, builds this family saga around his  love of medicine- the passion good doctors must have, the calling.  Marion’s story includes the history, myths, scents, and foods of Ethiopia, shifting seamlessly from beauty to poverty and back again.  As in all family sagas, there’s love, regret, loss, humor, mystery, and redemption.  Verghese even throws in a little magic realism for good measure.

The medical terms and surgical descriptions may put off some readers, but I found the book engrossing.