PARK BENCH by Chabouté

Gallery, Threshold, Pocket Books
Graphic & Comic Books
Publishing date September 19th 2017




Synopsis

From its creation, to its witness to the fresh ardor of lovers, the drudgery of businessmen, the various hopes of the many who enter its orbit, the park bench weathers all seasons. Strangers meet at it for the first time. Paramours carve their initials into it. Old friends sit and chat upon it for hours. Others ignore the bench, or (attempt to) sleep on it at night, or simply anchor themselves on it and absorb the ebb and flow of the area and its people.


My view

At first look this Comic Novel might seem a repetition of the same drawing with a few alteration.
A closer look, and life begins to move. The bench stands as an observer of our everyday life. As we walk past a same route day in, day out we overlook what surrounds us.
I loved the ending, very clever.

Thank you to NetGalley for this arc

BASED ON A TRUE STORY STORY by Delphine de Vigan

Reading French original version, available in English translation

Synopsis

L. embodies everything Delphine has always secretly admired; she is a glittering image of feminine sophistication and spontaneity and she has an uncanny knack of always saying the right thing. Unusually intuitive, L. senses Delphine's vulnerability and slowly but deliberately carves herself a niche in the writer's life. However, as L. makes herself indispensable to Delphine, the intensity of this unexpected friendship manifests itself in increasingly sinister ways. As their lives become more and more entwined, L. threatens Delphine's identity, both as a writer and as an individual.

This sophisticated psychological thriller skillfully blurs the line between fact and fiction, reality and artifice. Delphine de Vigan has crafted a terrifying, insidious, meta-fictional thriller; a haunting vision of seduction and betrayal; a book which in its hungering for truth implicates the reader, too—even as it holds us in its thrall.