Agnė Žagrakalytė

Klara. Bande dessinee

A starving half-orphan? A drug smuggler? A victim of a local hooligan? A comic book artist? Who is Clara, little Clara? One of them? All of them at the same time? Will art and fantasy help her cope with reality? It’s a novel about the position of a Central European in the western world, about a wounded child in an adult world, about the desire to free oneself from burdens, about the past that haunts, about working on oneself and escaping from oneself, about striving for integration and constant disintegration. And about very tasty dumplings.

Okładka książki "Klara Bande desine". Na okładce wachlarz z twarzy.

As the protagonist herself says: “After all, we are Lithuanian, and we have never been able to write novels, and we never will. Instead, we spend our entire lives writing one never-ending poem” – a judgment both harsh and sarcastic. Nevertheless, Klara is very close to poetry, mainly due to the dense language, prone to wordplay, onomatopoeia, and – as befits a comic book text – vivid, colorful descriptions.

Agnieszka Smarzewska

“Klara” presents a stark and minimalist prose style, economical in its use of words, without many adjectives and lofty terms, devoid of embellishments and unnecessary digressions. At the same time, though it may seem contradictory, it possesses an extraordinary poetic quality. It’s a story about a girl. A story about a woman. A story about loneliness and the constant need to escape and erase all traces.

Doris

Author and translator