Libération Review and Excerpt

My dear friend June Misserey in France just sent some photos of a feature on Tongues in one of France’s national dailies, Libération (a French edition of the book is due out in November from Arabile). The piece looks lovely and I was curious enough to translate it (via google translate) and post the entirety here for non-French speakers who might be interested. There are a few slightly odd phrasings (Google seems to really love the word “homunculus”), but otherwise it’s remarkably readable.

The byline is Marius Chapuis.

The book takes on the air of a great fantasy tale. A revolt of nature. A revolt of sharing against hoarding. This first volume stirs up many mysteries. It enchants in a way that American cinema no longer manages.

"It's so beautiful it's intimidating." That's what American Noah Van Sciver (author of Fante Bukowski) sighed when he discovered the first issue of Tongues that had been left lying around on a table. It was in 2019, during a workshop bringing together around fifteen comic book authors from America, Thailand, Europe, Israel, and more. The author of Tongues, Anders Nilsen, had just left the room, and finally, the others were allowing themselves to talk about his work or simply look at it without fear. While Anders Nilsen never achieved the fame of Chris Ware, Dan Clowes, or Charles Burns, his peers know the importance of his work. This relative anonymity suits this calm, slender man quite well. At that same workshop, while many authors were chatting at the table about their current readings or hobbies, Nilsen's face lit up at the mention of the skateparks in Portland, where he lives. It's rare to realize that the book you've been watching take shape for several years is destined to be the pinnacle of a career. Since this first installment, we've known that Tongues will take the form of a comprehensive work. And will be a major step in his career.

Nilsen, already forged by two decades of work on his art, summons all his know-how, his research on patterns, forms, their arrangement, to develop a cryptic odyssey on human nature, evolution, faith, compassion. Ten years he has been working on this fresco. Whereas each of his comics was until then a way of re-examining his approach, Tongues brings together, summons, and brings together his past. In its scope, the book – still under construction – evokes Big Questions (l'Association, 2012), his splendid Beckettian tome on birds in search of meaning. In its language, it evokes certain formal explorations explored in Fin (Atrabile, 2015), an experimental journal in which he evoked the disappearance of his fiancée, or the seminal Des chiens, de l'eau (Actes Sud, 2005). Or even the disconcerting shadow puppets of Poseidon's Wrath (Atrabile, 2018), cruel little tales about mythological figures displaced in contemporary America. Well, the one before Trump... Constructed almost by accident, this latest work left its author with a desire to explore the ancient pantheon further.

One could approach Tongues, with which Libération inaugurates its cycle of summer pre-publications, by emphasizing that it opens with a Promethean figure. Attached to a mountain, to the point of seeming to become one with its flora, a strange silhouette dreams. Of a primordial mud, of a little girl he has extracted from it. Before being recalled to reality, to the present tense, by his companion the Eagle. Every day, the bird of prey comes to devour his liver. In addition to constituting one of the book's central themes, the agony of the penitent infinity dictates the pages' shapes. The panels take on the form and arrange themselves like organs, and the page becomes a body. This is one of the astonishing things about Tongues, Nilsen's way of telling the story right down to the composition. Later, when it comes to beliefs and the war of chapels, he will assemble his huts like cairns, piles of stones intended to mark a path for his protagonists and/or to pay homage to distant forces.

Every day, the Eagle reports to the homunculus what he sees of the world. Its evolution. The birth of language, of music, the first houses and then cities. Or the column of Humvee military vehicles noisily crossing the desert. One could also say that Tongues is a book haunted by the American intervention in Iraq in 2003 (Nilsen was then taking her first steps as an artist). By the brutality of an armed force deployed in a territory that leaves it indifferent, that it does not seek to understand. We encounter violent soldiers devoid of cause. The first to be subjected to their cruel games is a strange young man wandering in the desert. A kid in a sweatshirt who seems to have neither point of origin nor destination. He walks with an absolute gesture, like Gus Van Sant's Gerry. One foot in front of the other and, all around, nothingness. He too is atoning for something.

The case is all the more intriguing when you consider that Nilsen's career began with the wanderings of this walker's Siamese twin, a teddy bear tied to his backpack. If the homunculus represents a form of certainty (punishment will come every day), this boy is nothing but doubt, indeterminacy. Between these two impulses, a young girl, Astrid. A figure of pure determination, bearer of values, she rises up against forces she doesn't fully understand. In her footsteps, the book takes on the air of a grand fantasy tale. A revolt of nature. A revolt of sharing against hoarding. We don't really know yet. The first volume of Tongues, which will be published in November, has nearly 400 pages and stirs many mysteries. It enchants in a way that American cinema no longer manages. It amazes because Anders Nilsen's style has never been so seductive. Light and sharp. Lush and comprehensive. We've been captivated ever since we first read the booklet a few years ago.