Saturday 16 January 2021

Cuerpos sonoros

by Julie Maroh
translated by Fernando Ballesteros

An author and a fan meet at a book signing.
Before the funeral, his ex-wife and adult son find solace in browsing through the dead man’s collection of old tapes.
A middle-aged couple are arguing in bed who’s going to feed the cat.

Unlike Maroh’s first book, Cuerpos sonoros is not a graphic novel but rather a collection of apparently disconnected graphic short stories. The common thread is “love in the city” — in Montreal, more precisely. A journey through all shades of sex/gender/orientation, from monogamy to polyamory, from passionate encounters between total strangers to decades-long partnership, from hope to despair and back, from childhood to the grave and beyond. Some of the stories are more convincing than others, and not all endings are happy, or at least not happy in a conventional sense. All this rainbow of love is expressed with mostly monochrome pencil drawings, vividly demonstrating that, in words of Enrique Bordes, “grey is also a warm colour”.

The Spanish title is a faithful translation of the original Corps sonores, while the English version, Body Music, is way off the mark.

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