In a series of dazzling fragments--skipping through time, and from raw, slashing color to delicate black-and-white--Dominique Goblet examines the most important relationships in her life: with her partner, Guy Marc; with her daughter, Nikita; and with her parents.
The result is an unnerving comedy of paternal dysfunction, an achingly ambivalent love story (with asides on Thomas Pynchon and the Beach Boys), and a searing account of childhood trauma--a dizzying, unforgettable view of a life in progress and a tour de force of the art of comics.
Sophie Yanow is a cartoonist and translator. She is the author of the autobiographical comic books War of Streets and Houses and What Is a Glacier? and of the Eisner Award-winning graphic novel The Contradictions.
Comics podcast hosted by Joshua Malbin, Alexander Rothman, & Joe Wessely. Reviews, interviews, meaningful pauses.
Top 8 for 2017 #5: Pretending Is Lying by Dominique Goblet (from @NYRcomics) https://t.co/cDEHCoXUmh
I yammer on about queer and translated fiction, small press, manga, and pretty books 📚🖼️ 🐶🌸🌈
68. Pretending is Lying story/art by Dominique Goblet. Translated by Sophie Yanow. Graphic novel. NYRB Comics https://t.co/2IYO18t4wy
Writer. Critic. Translator. Street cat photographer. President of the Great Clown Pagliacci fan club. Enjoyer of posts and content. #JewishPope2023
This morning I read PRETENDING IS LYING by Dominique Goblet, translated by Sophie Yanow, and it’s fantastic. A gorgeously tactile bit of comics that the immediate connections (and failures thereof) between person and environment in a really formally thrilling way. I loved it. https://t.co/CYA6Y00YUr
"This beautifully rendered, emotionally intense, and chronologically scattered reminiscence essentially questions the veracity of all autobiography." --Publishers Weekly
"Here's a terrific example of the current wave of great comics from Europe. Dominique Goblet's approach is postmodern, with a scruffy, anything-goes mix of styles and moods, but it's marked everywhere by her forays into photography. She intersperses her tale--an autobiographical account of family, a lover, truth, lies and brutality--with images that look like photos." --Etelka Lehoczky, NPR's Book Concierge, "2017′s Great Reads"
"Primarily pencil-sketched, Goblet's art is unbridled and alternately busy and peaceful. She uses lettering to great effect, too, expressing mood, feeling, and, in her father's case, drunkenness with the appearance of the text. Some pages feature only vague, dimly lit shapes, as if there are ghosts hovering on the periphery of Goblet's relationships, her memoir's primary subject. This is an imaginative, nonlinear rendering of an artist's life so far." --Booklist
"A touchstone work of comics autobiography, from one of the genre's key innovators, is finally translated, complete with expressive lettering newly handcrafted by the artist." --Sean Rogers, The Globe and Mail
"Pretending Is Lying is a perceptive and poignant contribution to the fields of both experimental comics and graphic autobiography, and well worth the read." --Hans Rollman, Pop Matters
"Combining paint, ink, charcoal, and pencil, Goblet's mixed-media pages feel wet, textured, bleeding. . . . [Pretending is Lying is] part of a rich tradition of international graphic memoirs from Art Spiegelman's Maus to Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis to Riad Sattouf's The Arab of the Future. . . . We're invited to peer into the artist's mind. . . . It is a privilege to serve as [her] confidante, if only for a while." --Chantal McStay, BOMB
"Dominique Goblet spent twelve years putting parts of her life to rest--explicit snippets and fragments that condense her entire childhood and sketch a tender portrait of the adult she is today. . . . Goblet hides nothing. And she forgives, weaving together, in gray and black and on yellowing paper, with strokes of her brush, a shocking kind of autobiography." --L'Express