Tuesday, March 26, 2024

The Arrival

Written by: Shaun Tan

This is a silent comic, which contains no text in English, or any other known language.

Why you should read this book: From the uncanny imagination of an artist known for banal surrealism comes a story that is at once touchingly familiar and confusingly alien: a depiction of the immigrant experience in a bizarre foreign land where everything is new and strange. A man leaves his wife and child in a world that seems similar to ours, except for the presence of enormous dragon shadows, and journeys to a more modern city where the food, the customs, the animals, and everything else, appear just as weird to him as they do to the reader. In time, he learns to navigate this world, meeting new people, discovering the good in his surroundings, until he is in a position to send for his family and help them comfortably settle into their new home. 

Why you shouldn't read this book: For a story with no words, it really makes you work; skimming is not an option. Every imagine must be scrutinized and parsed to make sense of the narrative. 

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