Pachyderme - Hardcover

Frederik Peeters

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1906838607 ISBN 13: 9781906838607

Publisher: SelfMadeHero, 2013

Synopsis

This cinematic tale opens surrealistically: with a traffic jam caused by a wounded elephant. Our heroine, Carice, abandons her car and walks trancelike through a wood to visit her husband in the hospital. Along the way she meets a few odd characters, including a blind pig keeper and an alien-looking baby. The surreal encounters do not stop there. The hospital is eerie and foreboding. When Carice’s whistling wakes up an apparently dead body in the morgue, she soon realizes that the aged cadaver she’s talking to is her future self.

Praise for Pachyderme:

“Peeters’ tale of self-discovery is enthralling; in the author’s hands, Cold War paranoia and thoughtfully subverted realist art provides commentary on other kinds of secrets, other kinds of betrayals and the conflict between duty and need.” ―Publishers Weekly (starred review)
“Peeters’ evocative artwork―inspired equally, it seems, by classic Hollywood and the great horror comics of mid-century―makes every page eye-catching.” ―Slate

About this title

About the Author

Frederik Peeters has been nominated five times at Angoulême in the best book category, and won the best series prize in 2013. He lives in Geneva, Switzerland.

Reviews

Peeters’ autobiographical award winner, Blue Pills (2008), ended with him chatting with a mammoth. The fictional Pachyderme begins in a traffic jam created by an elephant in the middle of the road. Out of the fray walks a stylishly dressed woman en route to her hospitalized husband. Cut to that institution’s surgical theater, from which the surgeon, who’s also the director, literally dances away from another successful procedure. Even before she reaches the hospital, the woman begins to see things (alien-looking babies) and when she wanders the building there is more: a spy-type capable of emerging from a pipe in the wall and, in the morgue, the reanimated corpse of an old woman who may be herself-to-come. She also encounters the surgeon-director, who comes on to her, and, briefly, her husband. Flashbacks to her just-earlier life, in which she gave up a concert pianist’s career for marriage, also feature in Peeters’ surreal, dreamlike tale, immaculately rendered in the cinematic realist manner typical of mainstream European comics. What it means exactly is up for grabs, but it has a happy ending. --Ray Olson

Edition details

• Publisher: SelfMadeHero
• Publication date: 2013
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1906838607
• ISBN 13: 9781906838607
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 88