Customer Reviews

Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic

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

 

 

utterly compelling, charming, sad and humourous. compelled to keep reading,i stayed in my bath until i was completely pruney, till i reached the very last page. it was well worth emptying the hot water tank.

while i have enjoyed her comic strip over the years, bechdel is clearly a much more talented, nuanced artist than "Dykes to Watch Out For" would indicate, both in terms of her visual acumen and her subtle use of structure and dialogue to capture the vagaries of memory and grief.

highly recommended.

Ever since I can remember, I''ve loved to see inside people's homes. Maybe it's a bit of voyeurism, or the half-hidden belief that if I can see the interior of their home, I may be given a greater understanding of the true nature of their interior self' or maybe I''m just nosey.

Fun Home by Alison Bechdel is a voyeur''s delight. Bechdel invites the reader into her childhood home to snoop, poke and prod at the most intimate core of family experience. No door is locked, nothing is off limits and all is revealed in the harsh glare of her formidable analytical critique. In the spotlight is Bechdel's relationship with her father; a critical, aloof, closet homosexual, more comfortable in the realm of academic philosophies and surface artifice than the often grubby and disorganized dwelling of emotional human relationships.

Bechdel weaves a family tapestry filled with the excitement of discovery, the sorrow of unfulfilled need, the grief of dreams adrift and the acceptance that comes with understanding. Her story is entwined with mythological patterns that spiral back and forth between the personal and universal creating a tightly crafted 'family tragicomic'. Bechdel's art re-enforces the impact of pattern with the use of sparse, unadorned line-work, softened by flat washes. Her accessible, whimsical line style gives the reader some breathable room to absorb the almost palpable sorrow of need and loss central to the theme of father and self.

A generous, intelligent autobiography, Bechdel's readers are saved from slitting their wrists in grief through her satiric sense of humour. Furniture polish is 'incipient yellow lung disease' (no really, 'it's very funny in context) and her ability to bring a black jocularity to the most sorrow-filled moments keeps you turning the page.

There is a strength and courage needed to publicly reveal so much intimacy with so little gloss and cover-up ' and as such, I can allow Alison Bechdel the occasion retreat behind the screen of intelligentsia to distance the emotional impact of revealing her naked interior self to the world. With Bechdel, at times I needed a dictionary. Sometimes I required a post-graduate degree in philosophy. However, these obstacles are easily forgiven - because Alison Bechdel let me see inside her home, opened all the doors' and turned on all the lights.

As Art Spiegelman proved with Maus, father memoirs can take graphic narrative form. Courageously original and lovingly honest, Fun Home is a coming of age story'a story of lesbian self-discovery'which also outs the father posthumously as a closeted gay man and a possible suicide. In intertwining her father's story with her own, Bechdel is conscious of being as ruthless as her father was in 'his monomaniacal restoration of our old house.' She, too, is a Daedalus, who answers 'not to the laws of society, but to those of [her] craft.' Profoundly personal, Fun Home is also mythic. From the opening page onward, it is a rich affirmation of Stephen Daedalus's closing words in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man: 'Welcome, O life, I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead.' This affirmation is triumphantly validated by 'the tricky reverse narration' of Fun Home's final panels, in which Bechdel's artistically resurrected, epic father is there to catch and save her child self.

Want a copy for my classroom. It's one of the titles I recommend to people who are just beginning to be interested in reading Graphic Novels.

I loved reading this. It was moving, seeing the difference in the two generations. I love Allison's art, and her bold and truthful story. Defitinely one of my favorite authors.

Fun Home is at once a coming-out story and an intense portrait of Alison Bechdel's father, Bruce Bechdel. The story is beautifully illustrated in greenish tones and, in its presentation of the father-daughter relationship of Alison and Bruce, deeply felt. What makes Fun Home distinctive is its constant reliance on literary artefacts and historical events to further the plot. Alison's historical reconstruction of her father's life as a closeted homosexual in the 70s and early 80s is set against a backdrop of events such as Watergate and the Stonewall Riots, and derives much of its power from allusions to authors such as Joyce, Proust, Fitzgerald, and Wilde. Similarly, the personal development of Alison is marked by a reliance on a rich supply of lesbian and feminist literature. In its overabundance of literary artefacts, Fun Home quickly becomes a story of words and stories, and how we find personal meaning in the shared histories and fables of humankind.

I really like Alison Bechdel's comics. But this book, though beautifully drawn, lacks "oomph" in the story. A kind of autobiography, but not a very compelling one.