Daytripper #6

by Fábio Moon and Gabriel Bá

Other reviewers have referred to this title as being pretentious, and I wonder what that says about me that it is consistently one of my favourite books each month.  Where others see pretension, I see a solid attempt to address some complicated themes using a genre that doesn't often get to deal with these types of quiet, involved stories.  I would have thought that by now the ending of each issue, which repeat the same result monthly, albeit in different ways, would have become a little too precious, but instead I find that the knowledge of how the chapter will end causes me to absorb every page as if it might hold a clue to the ending.

Moon and Bá are working in a very South American style, and their story's central conceit reminds me of writers like Borges and García Márquez, who were never willing to sacrifice their story for the constraints of reality.

In this issue, we meet Brás at the age of thirty-three, when a plane crash in Sao Paolo kills a couple hundred people.  Brás, as an obituary writer, is charged with the task of eulogizing each victim in print, which he does in a haze, as he believes that Jorge, his close friend and colleague, may have been on the plane.  His writing is populist in approach, with hands and hearts being recurring motifs.  In a lot of ways, this is a 9/11 story transposed onto Brazil, with the series of articles the New York Times ran about the victims of that tragedy being an obvious inspiration for Brás's assignment.

Like in New York, the people of Sao Paulo focus on the individual stories when the big picture becomes over-whelming, which is a lot like what Moon and Bá are doing with their short stories about the different period in Brás's life.  I find this book to be consistently thought provoking and beautiful, and am sad that there are only two issues remaining.