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Big Questions

ebook
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks
0 of 1 copy available
Wait time: About 2 weeks

A New York Times Notable Book of 2011, included on Amazon.com, Publishers Weekly, and NPR'S Best Comics lists

A haunting postmodern fable, Big Questions is the magnum opus of Anders Nilsen, one of the brightest and most talented young cartoonists working today. This beautiful minimalist story, collected here for the first time, is the culmination of ten years and more than six hundred pages of work that details the metaphysical quandaries of the occupants of an endless plain, existing somewhere between a dream and a Russian steppe. A downed plane is thought to be a bird and the unexploded bomb that came from it is mistaken for a giant egg by the group of birds whose lives the story follows. The indifferent, stranded pilot is of great interest to the birds—some doggedly seek his approval, while others do quite the opposite, leading to tensions in the group. Nilsen seamlessly moves from humor to heartbreak. His distinctive, detailed line work is paired with plentiful white space and large, often frameless panels, conveying an ineffable sense of vulnerability and openness.
Big Questions has roots in classic fables—the birds and snakes have more to say than their human counterparts, and there are hints of the hero's journey, but here the easy moral that closes most fables is left open and ambiguous. Rather than lending its world meaning, Nilsen's parable lets the questions wander where they will.

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    • Publisher's Weekly

      Starred review from August 22, 2011
      Epic in its scale and circumscribed in focus, Nilsen’s incisive Big Questions is a philosophical novel that uses the techniques of fable to investigate faith, society, disillusionment, and catastrophe. A dozen years in the making, Nilsen’s 600+-page story depicts the lives, bonds, and quarrels of a group of quizzical birds whose ontology is challenged by the appearance of a bomb, a crashed airplane, and a narcoleptic human pilot. At first these talkative avians resemble Charles Schulz’s Linus with their naïve philosophizing. But as the situation escalates, the book demonstrates how, in the absence of knowledge, germinal philosophy and early religion can be much the same thing. Competing mythologies, ideologies, and messianic fervor cause rifts within a community that otherwise unites as part of nature’s predatory food chain. Nilsen outlines his figures with a thin but commanding line, and builds texture and atmosphere with dense stippling and hatching, creating a lush, verdant landscape. His breathtaking vistas resonate with his characters’ struggle to assemble meaning from incomprehensible events—and to rebuild their world from the pieces left over.

    • Booklist

      Starred review from November 15, 2011
      Gray finches eat seeds on grassland sparsely punctuated by trees and a one-room house and cut through by a shallow river. Of two close together, one eats steadily, while the other raises existential questions. Later, a big bird swoops down and drops a huge egg. A charismatic finch develops a kind of cult around the egg, which eventually explodes, killing most of the cult, including its leader. Simultaneously, a military plane crash-lands, demolishing the house, killing an old woman, and leaving her grandson, a speechless simpleton, alone on the veld. Some remaining finches regard the plane as another big bird and its pilot as somehow its offspring after he clambers unscathed from its cockpit. Eventually, there's a deadly clash between pilot and finches when the former assaults the idiot grandson. All the birds have names and personalities and converse like humans in this enormous and elusive allegory, 15 years in the making, in which Nilsen employs the lightly magical realism of Dogs and Water (2004) rather than the absurdism of his two books of monologues. The artwork that fleshes out that realism is the most elaborate in all of Nilsen's work, with beautifully detailed landscapes set in large panels, a broad palette of grays, and a cinematographic quality that suggests constant movement. Utterly distinctive work.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2011, American Library Association.)

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