Daniel Clowes
Come un guanto di velluto forgiato nel ferro

LA RECENSIONE

There is a remote possibility that more is written here than you might want to know. Or maybe not. But you never know.

This graphic novel was serialized in the comic magazine "Eightball," curated, written, and drawn by the author himself from 1989 to 2004. Collected into a single volume, it was published in Italy by Coconino Press.

It's the story of a man who sets out to find his wife/ex-wife after seeing her in the film that gives the work its name, in an adult cinema. From there begins an extremely trippy nightmare, filled with grotesque characters, occasionally revolting, violence, a certain dose of sadism, a strong erotic component, international conspiracies for a new order under the brand of a friendly cartoon, feminist plots for the subjugation and extermination of the male gender, mystical unions with primordial broths with aberrant outcomes, but above all, a lot of paranoia and impotence. Two sensations that at certain moments reminded me a lot of Paul Auster's "New York Trilogy." And in general, David Lynch, who is always the first name that comes to mind, although I'm not sure how rightly in this case.

"Like a Velvet Glove Cast in Iron" is a mishmash of situations and parallel events at the edge of reality, seemingly disconnected, that will lead the protagonist to put together a disturbing puzzle where the world, being distorted, rows against his purpose, in a game of Chinese boxes in which everything can take a different form, where cause-effect chains circularize or are lost, where looms the premonition/remembrance of a terrible event. As much a peep show, as a freak show, as a psychological thriller, it spares little to decency and modesty, and you can revel happily and contently satisfying your attraction to the morbid and our most disturbing instinctual residues.
Nothing, and I mean nothing, in this novel is normal.

If possible, really, get it.