Don’t be afraid of the big tomes: world literature is often a battle with many sides. Anyone who reads the classics by Joyce, Proust, Dickens, Flaubert, Dostoyevsky, Musil, Cervantes and so many more needs some time and, of course, leisure. But anyone who has read more than one novel in their life that is not on some bestseller list for months (read: books that are older and have attracted several generations of readers) also knows that there is great literature too in a small format. The whole cosmos of human life on a small piece of paper.
“Of Mice and Men” by John Steinbeck, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature, is one such case. It follows honest George Milton and Lennie Small, two migrant workers moving from job to job in California during the Great Depression. Their relationship is heavily influenced by Lennie’s mental disability and George’s caring yet cunning way of looking after his big, strong companion, who soon has more than just mice on his conscience. The work on a farm is the focus of the narrow narrative, which comes to a head with symbolic, dramatic compression, why both of them actually had no chance of a connection from the beginning. It is the story of the (for many) basically doomed American dream, told with sparse linguistic resources and a radically realistic view of social structures.
revitalization of the text
Of course, “Of Mice and Men” has been part of school reading for a long time, it has been staged on theater stages and processed in radio plays for many decades. There are two excellent film adaptations (1939 by Lewis Milestone, four-time Oscar nominee; 1992 filmed by and starring Gary Sinise, with a dumb Lennie played by John Malkovich). And yet, even today, the reading experience remains harrowing and open to interpretation. As the French illustrator Rébecca Dautremer now shows in her version of the book. Dautremer didn’t make a graphic novel out of the material, she didn’t just contribute a few pictures to illustrate the plot. Instead, she carefully synchronized the entire text with pictures (in gouache and pencil) almost paragraph by paragraph. This means: 420 sheets with very dynamic scenarios, often very different in style, which not only give the words more power, but can also be understood as an interpretation and vitalization of the text. Sometimes these are sequences, sometimes large-format individual images.
Ninth Art Comic Blog
Approaching this extraordinary visualization of Of Mice and Men is quite intimidating. The images do not always hit the right note, but often enough they provoke contradiction or a deeper look at a work that was created with great care and has an almost biblical impact. Without having to set heaven and hell in motion, of course. With her Herculean task, Dautremer succeeded in moving a classic of literature into the world of comics without ever losing any of its intellectual weight.
ROLLING STONE gives an exclusive look at “Of Mice and Men”
All images: Splitter Verlag