Collection of short graphic stories about love and intimacy
Content warning: sexual themes
I picked this book up from Canty’s Bookshop recently. They have been getting in some great graphic novel stock, and this one caught my eye because the author is the same author behind “Blue is the Warmest Colour” that famously was made into an incredible film.
“Body Music” by Julie Maroh is a collection of short graphic stories set in the city of Montreal, Canada. Each story explores issues around love between two (or more) people, transcending gender, race and age. Some of the characters feature in more than one vignette, but each story is, for the most part, a standalone story.
Maroh is an exceptional artist with an honest illustrative style that highlights the beauty, the grotesque and the humanity that can be found in everyday life. Maroh has a natural flair for storytelling with each panel a quiet revelation of hope, pain, loneliness, and love. I really loved chapter 14, The Ghost of Illness, chapter 16, In the Heat of the Club. Sait Catherine Street East, and Charlene’s perspective in chapter 6, Fantasies of the Hypothetical. Maroh did an exceptional job depicting her characters with disabilities (which included a wheelchair user, a person who develops blindness and two men who use sign language), and presents sex as something awkward, humorous and tender. I also really enjoyed the diversity of bodies: slim, curvy, freckled, hairy.
While I felt that this was a beautiful book, I felt that there was something missing to tie all the stories together. Maroh is very committed to diversity, in theme as well as in her characters, but I think a side effect of this was that there wasn’t really a strong common thread to unite each vignette. Perhaps if she had intertwined the stories even more, and had more overlap between the characters and their experiences of living and loving Montreal, I may have gotten a stronger sense of the city itself.
A poignant and thought-provoking book full of excellent examples of the storytelling strength of the graphic novel genre.
Tinted Edges 