Review: The Building Opposite

The Building Opposite
By Vanyda
Fanfare/Ponent Mon, $21.99

I have mixed feelings about Kai-Ming Cha’s choice of The Building Opposite as the best manga of 2006. On the one hand, if she hadn’t mentioned it I might never have read it, and that would be a shame. On the other hand, the book doesn’t quite live up to its billing. It’s not the best book of the year; Vanyda is a young artist, and she hasn’t quite reached her stride. But that shouldn’t take away from what it is: a solid, well constructed, beautifully produced example of nouvelle manga.

The book, which was first published in France, is built up of interconnected short stories revolving around three couples who live in the same building: Pregnant single mother Beatrice and her four-year-old son Remi on the ground floor, middle-aged couple Fabienne and Jacky above them, and twentysomething students Claire and Louis in the attic. The neighbors don’t talk to each other much, but there is a certain elegance in the parallels of their lives. In “Just like every other Sunday,” the story follows the characters as they go about their Sunday morning activities, cutting from one to the other in an evocative way. Similarly, in the final chapter, Vanyda uses a panel structure that mimics the building itself, with three stories of the nighttime activities in each apartment, Claire and Louis on top, Fabienne and Jacky in the middle, Beatrice and her lover on the bottom, all running in parallel.

The great part of this book is watching the characters and their stories slowly unfold, often in brief vignettes in which very little seems to happen: Remi pesters a stranger on the bus, Jacky gives Beatrice a ride home from the supermarket, Claire locks herself out of the apartment. Vanyda reveals a little bit about her characters in each story. Unfortunately, she devotes much of the book to the dullest couple, Claire and Louis. We get to watch them brush their teeth and do the dishes and generally frolic around, but there’s not much conflict or growth in their relationship. Downstairs, the tensions between Fabienne and Jacky, Beatrice and Jacky, and Beatrice and her married lover are much more interesting. One single page showing Beatrice leaving the house to pick up her son has more story to it than six pages of Claire watching Louis’s friends play video games. That single page is Vanyda at her best, revealing an important part of Beatrice’s story in an understated way.

One of the things that takes this book out of the best-of ranks for me is the unevenness of Vanyda’s art. She is very good at capturing gesture and expression, but her figures seem flat and clumsy at times, particularly the stocky, wrinkled Fabienne and Jacky. Their bodies never seem to hang together convincingly, and their facial expressions disappear in a mass of too-thick lines. Part of the problem is that the book is composed of short comics that Vanyda drew between 1999 and 2003, and her artistic growth is evident in the difference between the first and the last story. Even at the end, though, the older characters’ faces look like masks. I have no doubt that we are looking at the early stages of what will be a stellar artistic career, but in this book, she’s not quite there yet.

On the other hand, her storytelling technique and composition are dead on from the very beginning, and the generous format of this edition really helps show that off. Her technique is almost cinematic—the camera catches Claire and Louis in bed, pans away as they begin to make love, focuses on the bathroom, then zooms slowly out through the window to an overall view of the building as a whole before moving down to the floor below, where Fabienne is about to choke on a peanut. Vanyda really stretches the rectangular panel to its narrative limit: she chops a single movement into several small panels, moves quickly from a long shot to extreme close-up, shifts points of view, leaves entire areas of the page white, or changes from one style to another for a single panel, if that’s what it takes to tell her story.

Like all Fanfare/Ponent Mon books, The Building Opposite is well produced and expensive. The trim size is larger than standard manga, and the cover is beautifully printed on heavy stock with French flaps. The paper is good quality, good enough to handle the large areas of pure black that Vanyda favors. Still, $21.99 is an extraordinarily high price for a single volume, even a well-produced, sophisticated story that is probably only going to see a small press run.

Despite its flaws, The Building Opposite is a significant book, one of what I hope will be a growing genre. There is something very real about this book. Each of the people emerges warts and all from the page. It’s manga for grownups, and I hope we will see more from Vanyda and from her publishers.

This review is based on a complimentary copy supplied by the publisher.

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Comments

  1. i love it

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  1. […] Speaking of whom: Brigid reviews Vanyda’s “nouvelle manga” release from Fanfare/Ponent Mon, The Building Opposite. […]