The Arrival

Shaun Tan, The Arrival (Arthur A. Levine, 2007)

There's a single panel, towards the end of Chapter 2 of Shaun Tan's remarkable graphic novel The Arrival, that sums up a great deal of what you need to know about the book. Previously, a man has left his wife and daughter behind to emigrate to a new land, where everything is unfamiliar to him. When, despite the cultural and language barriers he faces, he manages to find lodging, he pulls out his suitcase and opens it. Instead of the things he packed, what we see is his wife and daughter, sitting and eating a meal alone in the house he used to share with them. Everything about the scene is rendered in exquisite detail, and it's a perfect synecdoche for Tan's approach to his material here; the fabulist attitude laced with a hefty dollop of surrealism, the feel of how it is to be a stranger in a strange land, and Tan's sure hand with his illustrations, right down to the way he gives us the kind of cracking you see on old photographs.

As our nameless protagonist journeys through the city, he meets other immigrants, and he assimilates culturally by listening to their own stories of what it was like to emigrate from their homelands to this wonderful city where all of them have ended up. Tan tells a universal-- clichéd, perhaps-- story in such a unique way that I would think it impossible not to be charmed. This is fine, fine work indeed, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. You need to read this book. *****

The book takes a bit of struggle to read .... because there are no words. There are no words because the subject of the book doesn't read the language. You are equal to him in your understanding of the language of the book's writing. All is strange and magical, foreign and familiar. The one constant in the book is that people are people, always and everywhere.

Buy it, read it, share it with your friends.

This graphical comic is just beautiful. The story and metaphor are beautiful, as well as the drawings .. actually the drawings are uncredibly well done and each of them (even the less significant ones) could be used as prints. I was expecting to be a bit bored, since there is no text, but honestly no text is needed and the drawings say it all.
Higly recommended!!!!

The thing I really like about graphic novels is that you can usually read them in less than an hour. There are notable exceptions, of course, such as Alan Moore's The Watchmen. But most of the time, they read fast. I finally gave The Arrival a viewing, and it's quite an intriguing read.

The problem with describing it is that it's wordless. Much of the content is up to the viewer. You can make a guess as to what is happening or what is represented. Then, in about a year, you could look at it again and have a new take.

From what I can tell, this is the story of an immigrant that comes to a new land. We don't know why, only that he decides to pack up his bags and travel to a new home. He leaves a spouse and a daughter behind with great sadness. You can tell this parting brings them all pain. You can tell because of the drawings Shaun Tan made. Each one is packed with emotional punch.

I can only assume the immigrant is coming to America, although you wouldn't know it at first glance. To give us a sense of what it must be like for an immigrant, Tan creates a world in which nothing makes sense. There are strange symbols, pets, and foods. As the people on the boat arrive at the dock, they don't see the Statue of Liberty. Instead, they see a statue of two men shaking hands. On their shoulders are two animals, and one man holds a fruit. This is Tan's stroke of genius. He allows us to feel what immigrants must feel when they enter a strange country. No words are readable; no speech can be understood. Every vision is unfamiliar and sometimes scary. The man must use crude drawings he makes to communicate his needs for shelter or food.

We follow this man around as he tries to make sense of his new home. The reader will have many questions. For instance, why are there dragon scales following the man as he leaves his home? Why does he see the creature that follows him around as an alien baby? Is this because to immigrants, dogs and cats would not be common pets? What are the spaceships flying around supposed to represent? Buses? Planes?

I suppose that Tan could be going for a non-literal translation. In other words, maybe every item viewed on the pages isn't supposed to represent a counterpart that would be identifiable in America. Maybe the spaceships just represent transportation, and the alien creature just represents another life form, rather than a literal dog or cat.

The drawings are certainly beautiful, and readers will enjoy following the man's story. This is recommended for all ages.

This is a brilliant masterwork of ....what exactly?

Well, it's a graphic novel with the overwhelming force of franz Masereel's pioneering work 'The City'

But it's also evocative of great literature, like Kafka's introductory chapters of 'Amerika' and 'The Castle', or his short story, The Animal in the Synagogue, and the dazzling architectural fantasy of Italo Calvino's Invisible Cities.

But it's also a dark fairy tale of uncertainty and catastrophe, survival and wonder, one that brings the ghastly sweep of the twentieth century into mythical focus. Yes, it's that good.

But it's also an amazing book for children on the verge of arriving into the strange world of adulthood.

But it's also a revelatory book for adults to come to terms with what they have wrought, look through the eyes of a visitor, like an innocent child, and arrive to a new conclusion about where they "fit".

But it's also a philosophic parable on the Lacanian sinthome, broken letters or words struggling to come into existence for the child/visitor/adult.

But it's also a silent film on paper, with a Buster Keaton hatted protagonist arriving into a new world.

But it's also a beautiful album of artwork, each page can stand independently as an image, or ensemble of images. So the narrative runs through each page, but the page does not depend on the next page to have meaning, beauty, and integrity.

But, because of these important aesthetic accomplishments, it's also more than the sum of its parts.

We have here a standard of art few have realized, a deeply empathetic and compassionate allegory of human being anyone on the planet can read and close their eyes when they close the book and know something beautiful has arrived.