Customer Reviews
best anti-xenophobe book ever 
2008-05-25
The book takes a bit of struggle to read .... because there are no words. There are no words because the subject of the book doesn't read the language. You are equal to him in your understanding of the language of the book's writing. All is strange and magical, foreign and familiar. The one constant in the book is that people are people, always and everywhere.
Buy it, read it, share it with your friends.
Beautiful - both story and drawings 2008-05-19
This graphical comic is just beautiful. The story and metaphor are beautiful, as well as the drawings .. actually the drawings are uncredibly well done and each of them (even the less significant ones) could be used as prints. I was expecting to be a bit bored, since there is no text, but honestly no text is needed and the drawings say it all.
Higly recommended!!!!
Stranger in a Strange Land 2008-05-06
The thing I really like about graphic novels is that you can usually read them in less than an hour. There are notable exceptions, of course, such as Alan Moore's The Watchmen. But most of the time, they read fast. I finally gave The Arrival a viewing, and it's quite an intriguing read.
The problem with describing it is that it's wordless. Much of the content is up to the viewer. You can make a guess as to what is happening or what is represented. Then, in about a year, you could look at it again and have a new take.
From what I can tell, this is the story of an immigrant that comes to a new land. We don't know why, only that he decides to pack up his bags and travel to a new home. He leaves a spouse and a daughter behind with great sadness. You can tell this parting brings them all pain. You can tell because of the drawings Shaun Tan made. Each one is packed with emotional punch.
I can only assume the immigrant is coming to America, although you wouldn't know it at first glance. To give us a sense of what it must be like for an immigrant, Tan creates a world in which nothing makes sense. There are strange symbols, pets, and foods. As the people on the boat arrive at the dock, they don't see the Statue of Liberty. Instead, they see a statue of two men shaking hands. On their shoulders are two animals, and one man holds a fruit. This is Tan's stroke of genius. He allows us to feel what immigrants must feel when they enter a strange country. No words are readable; no speech can be understood. Every vision is unfamiliar and sometimes scary. The man must use crude drawings he makes to communicate his needs for shelter or food.
We follow this man around as he tries to make sense of his new home. The reader will have many questions. For instance, why are there dragon scales following the man as he leaves his home? Why does he see the creature that follows him around as an alien baby? Is this because to immigrants, dogs and cats would not be common pets? What are the spaceships flying around supposed to represent? Buses? Planes?
I suppose that Tan could be going for a non-literal translation. In other words, maybe every item viewed on the pages isn't supposed to represent a counterpart that would be identifiable in America. Maybe the spaceships just represent transportation, and the alien creature just represents another life form, rather than a literal dog or cat.
The drawings are certainly beautiful, and readers will enjoy following the man's story. This is recommended for all ages.
astonishing arrival 2008-04-24
This is a brilliant masterwork of ....what exactly?
Well, it's a graphic novel with the overwhelming force of franz Masereel's pioneering work 'The City'
But it's also evocative of great literature, like Kafka's introductory chapters of 'Amerika' and 'The Castle', or his short story, The Animal in the Synagogue, and the dazzling architectural fantasy of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.
But it's also a dark fairy tale of uncertainty and catastrophe, survival and wonder, one that brings the ghastly sweep of the twentieth century into mythical focus. Yes, it's that good.
But it's also an amazing book for children on the verge of arriving into the strange world of adulthood.
But it's also a revelatory book for adults to come to terms with what they have wrought, look through the eyes of a visitor, like an innocent child, and arrive to a new conclusion about where they "fit".
But it's also a philosophic parable on the Lacanian sinthome, broken letters or words struggling to come into existence for the child/visitor/adult.
But it's also a silent film on paper, with a Buster Keaton hatted protagonist arriving into a new world.
But it's also a beautiful album of artwork, each page can stand independently as an image, or ensemble of images. So the narrative runs through each page, but the page does not depend on the next page to have meaning, beauty, and integrity.
But, because of these important aesthetic accomplishments, it's also more than the sum of its parts.
We have here a standard of art few have realized, a deeply empathetic and compassionate allegory of human being anyone on the planet can read and close their eyes when they close the book and know something beautiful has arrived.
Show, Don't Tell 2008-04-17
The number one rule for writers everywhere is "Show, don't tell," and Shaun Tan's lovely, fragile, evocative wordless picture book is the ultimate expression of that rule. In an era when even in the enlightened United States of America, immigrants tend to be mistrusted, this book serves as a powerful reminder that the immigrant experience is fundamental to our heritage. But it is far more universal than that--it captures the dreads and hopes of ANYONE seeking to make a new life for themselves ANYWHERE. The ways in which, not only through the main character, but through visual flashbacks from his new friends, we are shown symbolically the kinds of oppression that drive people from their homelands, are particularly striking, as are the tender ordinary moments such as the man's cherished memories of his wife and child, who have yet to join him.
This is a picture book for older children and adults--and why shouldn't they have something this strange and wonderful? Why should small children be the only recipients of an art form whose full potential may arguably be realized for the first time in an extraordinary work like The Arrival?
I bought this book, not only because it was well reviewed, but because I own and love Tan's book, The Red Tree. But this book takes Tan's artistry to a whole new level. I was moved in so many ways, I can't even begin to name them. I'm usually inclined to offer some kind of congratulations to the author or illustrator of a particularly fine work, but in this case, all I can say to Shaun Tan is "Thank you."
Amazing and Beautiful! 2008-07-17
I found out about this marvelous book through Neil Gaiman's Journal. The Arrival was my first graphic novel and I was awed by the intensity and yet nuanced storytelling accomplished with absolutely no text!
Even though the country the immigrant comes to is very foreign in some major ways and the feeling of dislocation and fear are strong for the man who is the main character, still there are little touches of familiarity in this strange place, and the people open up to him.
The drawing is quietly compeling, and I found myself pouring over the pages, finding new delights on every street corner and windowsill.
I would recommend this book to all ages; after I read it, I shared it with my granddaughters, and they loved it, too!
Powerful imagery makes its point 2008-07-15
This book tells the story of an immigrant, who leaves his homeland for reasons that are unclear but definitely seem to be unpleasant. He is overwhelmed by his new home, and absolutely nothing seems familiar, to the point of no longer being recognizable. The food is different, the language is different, the currency is different, the animals are different, and he cannot read the writing. His inability to read the writing is demonstrated quite graphically, literally, by having all the writing use an alphabet other than any I have seen from any country on Earth. He must find a place to live, a job so that he can support himself, and figure out how to survive. The foreignness and the overwhelming strangeness of the land is demonstrated by having many ordinary objects be much larger than normal, as well as having a definite surreal atmosphere pervade the entire book. Will the immigrant find a way to live? Can he find happiness? Can he be reunited with his family, by helping them be able to join him?
This might be the most unusual book I have "read," and it is hard to review it. Brian Selznick's The Invention of Hugo Cabret was about seventy percent illustrations, blended seamlessly with text, yielding a riveting tale. The Arrival is one hundred percent illustrations, that appear to be pencil drawings. The illustrations are excellent in quality, making this at least as much an art collection as a novel. The content varies from photograph-like to surrealism, slightly reminiscent of a blend of Van Gogh and Rivera. The paper is very high in quality and the cover looks almost like an ancient leather-bound manuscript. The entire book has an antique look and feel to it, with the paper looking aged and slightly water stained around the edges, and a sepia tone to the images.
My initial impression of the book was that the author had gone a bit too far in making his point. By taking the unfamiliar and portraying it as surreal and unearthly, I thought this was an example of overstatement causing the author to lose track of his own point. But, this is a book that, once read, keeps echoing and reverberating. I now think I was taking it too literally, at first, as the more lasting impression is one of the book having been truly haunting and, despite the downright alien (as in extraterrestrial) look of many of the image, Shaun Tan has genuinely captured the feel of chronic and pervasive displacement experienced by many immigrants. Again, like some artwork, the impact of this book is not immediate, but in its lasting effect.
Personal note: One the cover of the book is an image of the protagonist, and an animal that is not of this reality. That animal, the protagonist's pet and companion in the strange land, became symbolic of what I think of the book: at first, I saw it as a prime example of the author going too far; now, I want a critter like that! In a way, you can judge this book by its cover.
-- Chris McCallister, author of Coming Full Circle
An amazing book and more! 2008-07-03
Saying that it is an amazing book would be selling it short! Like all fine works of art it is to be cherished. Go grab a copy and 'see' it if you haven't or even if you have!
The plight of the immigrant in graphic novel form 2008-06-13
This book tells the story of a man who leaves his home and family and comes to start a new life for them all in an alien culture. Because The Arrival is a graphic novel that takes as it's setting an imaginary land with a unique language, the reader is able to enter the world as the protagonist does, completely at the mercy of the world he's trying to call home. The fine and suggestive illustrations allow the reader to experience the confusion, isolation, terror and wonder of this journey. This book helped me to appreciate the struggles my own ancestors, and everyone else in America's ancestors, must have faced in their passage of immigration. I also found a new compassion for those future citizens hoping to live within our borders, whose difficulties and challenges they must face daily. In California you meet so many different nationalities, so many people trying to make a new life for themselves and their families, and they're doing it for the most part with dignity and purpose, starting with the simple desire to begin again in a land of opportunity. The Arrival depicts this ambition with genuine sincerity and truth. I highly recommend it.
Perfect. 2008-05-30
Shaun Tan, The Arrival (Arthur A. Levine, 2007)
There's a single panel, towards the end of Chapter 2 of Shaun Tan's remarkable graphic novel The Arrival, that sums up a great deal of what you need to know about the book. Previously, a man has left his wife and daughter behind to emigrate to a new land, where everything is unfamiliar to him. When, despite the cultural and language barriers he faces, he manages to find lodging, he pulls out his suitcase and opens it. Instead of the things he packed, what we see is his wife and daughter, sitting and eating a meal alone in the house he used to share with them. Everything about the scene is rendered in exquisite detail, and it's a perfect synecdoche for Tan's approach to his material here; the fabulist attitude laced with a hefty dollop of surrealism, the feel of how it is to be a stranger in a strange land, and Tan's sure hand with his illustrations, right down to the way he gives us the kind of cracking you see on old photographs.
As our nameless protagonist journeys through the city, he meets other immigrants, and he assimilates culturally by listening to their own stories of what it was like to emigrate from their homelands to this wonderful city where all of them have ended up. Tan tells a universal-- clichéd, perhaps-- story in such a unique way that I would think it impossible not to be charmed. This is fine, fine work indeed, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. You need to read this book. *****
