Review 13: My Dirty Dumb Eyes by Lisa Hanawalt

After the weight of The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (both figuratively and literally – I weighed the book and it came out at approximately the same as 2 African elephants, or, if you’ve not gone metric yet, 1.5 Africanne elephants) I desperately needed something light and fun. Happily, Lisa Hanawalt’s My Dirty Dumb Eyes entered stage left to provide exactly that comic relief.

Hanawalt isn’t exactly a household name, but she’s very well-respected in the publishing industry, and you’d probably recognise her artistic style from the anthropomorphic animal circus of BoJack Horseman, for which she is the production designer. This collection takes that style and combines it with Hanawalt’s own humour – surreal, crude, hilarious.

The artwork varies in style throughout the book, but for me it’s at its best when she’s adopting the style that was also the best thing about BoJack Horseman - an odd combination of semi-realistic, highly detailed animals and cartoony blocks and colours. It’s really beautiful at times, even when she’s drawing a horse-man with baby birds hatching in his eyes and nose.

Let’s be clear, the humour is about as broad as the Norfolk Broads. She can dart from weird bizarro-dream to crude sex jokes and back again in a couple of panels. But if you sit in the centre of a Venn diagram where one circle is surrealist jokes and the other is sex jokes – and I do – then this is the right party for you. Come on in! But wipe your filthy feet on the mat first.

I mean, how can you not love a book with this thrown in without so much as an introduction?

The best parts of the book, for me, were her running commentaries on films she watched. These are mostly straight text, with accompanying images for her interpretations of what’s going on. She turns almost comic anthropologist in these, dissecting the film, the audience and her own reactions with cutting, odd wit.

I’ll leave you with this:

--

This is my thirteenth book review of 100 to raise money for Refuge, the domestic abuse charity. If you liked this review, or just want to help out, please donate on the link below!

Comments

Review 5: Gulp - Adventures on the Alimentary Canal by Mary Roach

When it comes to the works of Mary Roach, this ain’t my first Roach-eo - I’ve previously read and been entranced by Stiff , her foray into the world of corpses. But I still wasn’t expecting to like this book quite so much as I did. It’s one of the most enjoyable reads I’ve had for a long time. Gulp is a hotchpotch journey down the alimentary canal - the big vacuum cleaner bag that runs from our mouths to our exit wounds. Roach isn’t writing a medical textbook here though. She follows the stories of things that sound interesting, or gross, or (regularly) both, so you end up with quite a lot of stuff that’s tangentially-related rather than a tube-by-tube account of your inner passages. And that’s all for the betterment of the book. Here are a few facts and amusing asides I noted down during reading: Fabric softener works by slightly digesting the fibres of your clothes, using the same enzymes as in your guts. Painting restoration workers often spit on swabs to take layers...

Review 4: I Love Dick by Chris Kraus

I Love Dick is a book whose title feels like a deliberate trick to make you aware of other people looking at you when reading it on a train. I’m certain that it will have been a publishing decision to catch the eye. I look forward to seeing the same publisher’s follow-up hits, Eat All Puppies and I’m Not Racist, But… Publishing chicanery aside, ILD is, in its through-line, about a woman who develops a mostly one-sided infatuation with a man called Dick (get it? The title was a phallusy). But it’s an indirect plotline, with plenty of other ruminations about gender, art, politics and more thrown in too. “Plotline” may not be quite the correct term to use, given that the basis for the book is essentially autobiographical, and it reads like a memoir in the clothes of literature – or possibly the other way around. You’re certainly aware that these are real people being discussed, none more so than the author, Chris Kraus, who brings her whole self to bear on the page, with all the m...

Review 33: The Veiled Woman by Anaïs Nin

Okay, so it’s basically my own fault for not properly researching what I was reading. I knew of Anaïs Nin as a writer of fiction and essays, so when I picked up this slim volume of short stories, I thought little of it. But as it turns out, she also wrote erotic literature. I’ve reviewed quite a few graphic novels during this 100 Book Year, but this is my first set of graphic short stories. And by graphic , I don’t mean it has pictures. I took this to read this on the train, and as my misconception became clearer, found myself regularly glancing anxiously at the woman next to me in case she could read the content of the page I was on and now considered me a Public Transport Pervert. It’s important to consider these stories in their proper context. Nin, a complex and controversial character, wrote mostly in the 1940s within a circle of mostly-male literary elite, and sought to find her place at the lead of it. She’s widely considered ground-breaking in the West as a woman writ...

The 100 Book Year

Search This Blog