I first learned about this book from a movie trailer I randomly came across on YouTube. The director who made Back to the Future, Cast Away, and Forrest Gump is directing the movie Here staring Tom Hanks and Robin Wright. To be honest, the movie didn’t look that interesting to me. The fact that it told the story of one corner of a house throughout thousands of years of history just seemed too limiting to make for a very interesting movie. But when I heard that it was based on a graphic novel, I was intrigued. As a book, that concept might work. So I requested it from my library.
The graphic novel focuses on a corner of a living room in a house somewhere in North America, perhaps New England. The panels on each page show things from different times in that same room. Here is a sample of how it looks.
There are very few words on the page. The “reader” is left to contemplate the juxtaposition of the collages on each page. It explores how similar we are across the ages, while at the same time illustrating the enormous change across our planet over the millennia. It’s not a riveting piece of storytelling. But it is a unique experiment in storytelling. It doesn’t take very long to get through and is worth each moment spent in contemplation.
My rating: 4/5
