I have three copies of Tintin in America. These are: The 2018 softcover color edition from Egmont (bought as a part of the massive Tintin Box Set, which contains all books bar Tintin in the Congo), henceforth America 1; the 2018 black and white facsimile edition (meant to represent the "original" version as drawn by Herge in 1932) from Last Gasp, henceforth America 2; and the 2020 version from Moulinsart, which features colors over the original black and white art, henceforth America 3. Each of these books is different, sometimes in a striking manner; but each is, in its own way, Tintin in America. Or maybe, like the Holy Trinity, each is just a facet of some greater whole that is beyond my ability to fully perceive.
We worked through the whole process. Or really, she did. I mostly observed and took notes in awe as she eyeballed vast quantities of food, even the high-impact ingredients that, in inexperienced hands, can turn the end product into a salty disaster. When she finished and filed the kimchi in a special fridge on the porch, my lasting impression was of how she was able to do it without measuring a thing.
The visiting poet sits facing her, so very clothed, at a table in a public place in the middle of the afternoon. He takes a sip of his hot cocoa and grimaces. Horrible, he says, pushing it away, and she recognizes the face he’d made at the bar the night before, when, on learning where she was from, originally, he recalled drinking a terrible cup of coffee at the bookstore café of a university some two hundred miles from her hometown. In a low voice he asks her how she made it home last night, whether she’d walked back to her dorm in the end or caught a cab, and she tries not to stare at the white patch in his beard, that thistly terrain her teeth—hers!—had grazed. She’s too warm in her wool sweater, the sudden change from the sharp spring air to the heated interior has made her throat go dry, so that when she tells him she did, in fact, walk, she begins to cough. She coughs five times in quick succession and with each of these short ragged expulsions of air directed into the back of her sleeve, the look on his face gets a little more impatient, the skin between his thick eyebrows pinching as it did when she first came up to him after the reading, mispronouncing several words in his mother tongue.
If individuals are like cities, our loved ones are the skyline: buildings that shape our identity, that we use to map our understanding of ourselves from different angles. Binnie Kirshenbaum’s novel Counting Backwards looks at what happens when the building that the rest of our city, self, and life is built around comes crumbling down.
The great virtue of Eribon’s memoir is that it compels us to confront our fixation on youth, our sweeping of elderly people to the margins, how we treat them not as humans but as business opportunities. All of these bespeak a blind, narcissistic and callous society. He asks profound questions that are at once philosophical, deeply personal and topical: can the completely dependent speak for themselves – and if not, who can speak for them? How does our society treat the elderly? Shabbily is Eribon’s answer to the last of these.