I like Lucy Knisley’s work a whole lot, and this was a quick and fun read. It’s a travelogue/graphic-memoir of a trip to Europe that Knisley took in 2011, when she was 27, and includes her travels to/in Norway (Bergen), Sweden (Stockholm), Germany (Berlin) and France (Beaune, Angoulême, Royan, and Paris). The trip is partly work, partly pleasure: in Norway, she speaks at a comics fest and teaches workshops about making comics to schoolkids, and then she’s off to Sweden to visit a Swedish guy she met at a party in New York. He ends up coming to Berlin with her to visit two honeymooning friends of hers, after which she goes to France to hang out with a friend and then her mom/two of her mom’s friends. After that, the Swedish guy meets her in Paris, where they spend a little while together before they each head home again.
I like Knisley’s work best when she’s looking outward rather than inward, I think largely because I prefer reading introspective prose that is more wordy, more densely prose-y, but this book had some satisfying thoughtful moments. On the appeal of travel, there’s this, from the start of the book: “Being untethered, I could float away, lifted to a great height where everything is new, and I could look back on my life with new perspective, and go, “Oh!””(1). Travel, Knisley says, “unhomes you,” and when you’re set adrift temporarily, you can see things differently: you can see possibilities. Which is why travel particularly appeals to her when she’s in her late twenties: she’s done with school, and has been for a while, but her life isn’t yet settled: she’s only recently moved to New York, she’s single but pining for her ex, and she’s figuring out her wants and priorities.
The art in this book, as usual, is gorgeous: I like Knisley’s clean black-and-white line drawings, and the full-color images in this book interspersed with them are bright and warm and super-appealing, whether they’re pictures of Knisley on her couch with her cat, or a black-roofed yellow building seen from her hotel room in Bergen, or a row of old buildings in Stockholm. The format of this book feels looser/a little less grid-based than Relish (which I also really liked!) was: I like the room, in this one, that Knisley gives to her art.
My favorite bits, though, are the ones most about the places where Knisley is. Like where she’s describing flying over “miles of totally uninhabited land” in Iceland, where there is “so much earth without human landmarks—the rare house or tower throwing the rest of it into enormous scale” (33). Or the drawing, on the next page, of a rainy day in Bergen, with charming cobbled streets and tiled rooftops and pedestrians with umbrellas. Or when she talks about visiting the Hospices de Beaune, founded in 1443, and describes (and draws) the building’s roof-tiles, the curtained beds inside, the pewter objects used by the patients, the bottles of old medicine in the apothecary. Also, not travel-related, but: I love that she quotes John Donne.
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