The Taste of Figs

The House

When father is gone, and memories fill the old house...
A collage of life's vignettes, past and passing,
Seeking the origin and destination of life
A heartfelt confession from the Spanish comic master
Depicting the love and thorns in family life
A healing work overflowing with family affection and redemption
A small gift to share this winter
★Editor's Recommendation
◎Awards and international acclaim pour in, a graphic autobiography and memoir by a Spanish comic master, a much-discussed bestseller in many countries.
Paco Roca, one of Spain's top contemporary comic artists, is internationally renowned for his profound and creative works. His works not only possess high artistic value but also strong social significance, particularly his portrayal of the lives of the elderly, which has resonated widely and sparked discussion. His works have been translated into over ten languages and have won numerous world-class awards.
His breakthrough work, the classic graphic novel "Wrinkles," won the 2008 Spanish National Comic Award, the Best Script and Best Work awards at the Barcelona Comic Festival, the Madrid Hottest Comic Award, and the Rome Comic Con Grand Prize. It was adapted into an animated film with great influence and received high praise from Ghibli's Isao Takahata. In China, there is also a play "Dad" adapted from this animated film. In Japan, "Wrinkles" not only won an Excellence Award at the Media Arts Festival, but its sales also surpassed Marvel's heavyweight masterpiece "Civil War" that year.
This autobiographical "The House" also won the favor of readers and peers, receiving multiple awards including the 2015 Comic Zone Award for Best National Comic, the 2016 Le Parisien's Outstanding Comic of the Year, the 2017 Grand Comic Award, and the 2017 Rome Comic Con Grand Prize. It has been translated into 15 languages, including French, English, Japanese, Korean, German, Portuguese, and Turkish, becoming a bestseller in many countries, and thus winning the 2020 Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material. In 2024, it will be adapted into a live-action film.
◎A sincere, rich, and ingeniously structured heartwarming story that confronts the ordinary and impermanence of life, evoking similar life memories with trivial details.
This deeply personal yet universal graphic novel offers us a glimpse into the laughter, guilt, and disappointment within family life. The work is dense, enduring, unadorned, pure in flavor, leaving one with mixed emotions. The author uses personal experience as a guide, sincerely presenting a raw and honest depiction that is nothing short of a baring of the heart.
The narrative structure is equally brilliant, opening with a series of silent panels that immediately grab the reader's attention. It disrupts chronological order, interweaving the stories of family members. The understated "happy moments" depicted are like a surging current, making the emotional core of memory and departure overflow within the trivialities of family life.
The work fully captures the complexity of life and emotions, and deeply portrays the inner struggles of ordinary people: wanting to move past the past while also wanting to hold onto memories; embodying various forms of happiness and love, with a warm core; and further proving that plain, ordinary stories can have infinitely broad wingspans. Its content is rich, printing vague inner emotions onto paper, witnessing the sadness, secrets, happiness, and doubts that everyone experiences in life, melting into the gentle flow of life.
◎Textbook-level use of color, lines, details, perspective, and paneling, showing how a top-tier comic artist masters the language of comics.
The brightly colored house landscape is serene and peaceful, and the garden scenes and interior furnishings are meticulously drawn, with rich details enhancing the sense of realism, making readers believe that this house truly exists in the world. The characters are simply drawn, with few lines, but each stroke perfectly captures their spirit and dynamism, filling the scenes with life, and expressing subtle emotions with exceptional authenticity.
The use of shadows is excellent, clean and transparent, combined with large areas of warm tones, creating a solid bright atmosphere. Just by looking at the drawings, one can feel the gentle breeze of a summer evening. At the same time, different warm and cool colors cleverly distinguish between past and present, like light changing with time, immersing the reader. The vividness brought by color and the frankness brought by lines give this deeply emotional story a transparent richness.
Furthermore, the entire work's wide-format horizontal design is also worth pondering. It largely uses square panels, arranged like tiles, so that it takes longer to read a line than in a typical comic. There are no multiple changes in perspective, giving readers a relaxed feeling, and horizontal reading also makes the flow of time within the work smoother, allowing the story to linger in the mind. The numerous montages and various comic element compositions (family tree, tree rings, close-ups of characters, arrows indicating objects) interspersed throughout further add diverse forms of expression, vividly portraying psychological distance and the passage of time.
◎A comfortable reading experience, a small gift to exchange, using details to adorn the entirety and parts of the physical comic book.
The book's binding follows the English edition's design, with a cover made of Yashi art paper, highly decorative, with a unique bark texture, embodying natural beauty. The hardcover with a rounded spine is full and elegant, comfortable to hold and easy to flip through. The endpapers are printed in two spot colors, with a fig flesh "Bourbon Red" base, dotted with golden fig patterns, paired with custom red, white, and blue woven headbands, adding a softer texture to the book, like a thoughtful gift that can be exchanged.
★Synopsis
"The House" depicts a story of family affection and redemption.
A year after their father's death, three siblings return to the house their family built together. Each with their own unresolved issues (the eldest brother resents their father's indifference to their mother's death; the second brother feels their father didn't understand his dream of being a writer; the youngest sister feels her father passed away too quickly, leaving her with regrets), they, along with their respective families, begin to clear out the house in preparation for selling it. As trash is hauled away and dust is wiped clean, past memories gradually fill the empty house, and they recall beautiful moments, once again discovering things they might not have noticed before. Can they mend their relationships while renovating the house?
★Reviews
This story was born at an important moment for me. At that time, I became a father and lost my father almost simultaneously. When that happens, you rethink many things. I wanted to draw a story where the characters weren't heroes, just very ordinary people. His only achievement was to be a father to a family, humble in origin, but eager to leave his children something he didn't have.
—Paco Roca
Roca's art masterfully blends cartoon doodles with realism... particularly striking is the gentle humor and deep empathy in the work, even as it is unflinching.
—Booklist review
As a leader on the national comic stage, Roca has completed his 17th full work. Though outwardly simple and everyday in story, it, like those first-rate literary works, speaks of the passage of time. This is a tear-jerking work, a treasure of Spanish comics this year.
—Zona Negativa (Spanish comic portal) review
Roca is not content with his achievements in graphic novels, using various comic techniques, starting from common everyday scenes—dry branches, piled fallen leaves, jars full of trash—to immerse us in this story. This is the last letter drawn for a deceased father, and also for childhood memories, for moments that cannot be replayed, and we, many of us who have read this astonishing work, are no strangers to those moments.
—Freek! magazine
Moving, delicate, pure life and time. It is told gently. It gave me goosebumps. Paco Roca proves himself an excellent storyteller in this book. Fortunately, those who know how to tell stories always encounter something.
—Director, artist Javier Mariscal
The constant warmth of Spain, full of intimacy, full of vitality, full of human touch. The time train of childhood heads towards the future, but the memories in the house cannot escape the past. After years of refinement, some special content becomes increasingly clear. In this graphic novel, life flows naturally, people embrace joy and face sorrow; it is a moving portrait of a family—and, extended, it is a portrait of everyone's life.
—Fernando Marías, author of "Father's Island," Spanish writer
Conflicting emotions towards family, pain, regret, and love, are purified through cleaning the house. And we may never fully understand our parents. The comic does not force tear-jerking plots; I think this sense of distance, where warmth and indifference can be felt, represents kinship itself. At the end of the story, when Manolo pulls out the fig tree, I almost cried.
—goodreads reader
Everyone might be embarrassed to write about their own father. What were his dreams and aspirations when he was young? How did he meet his mother, and how was he born? The old house is not the channel that pulls family home; the relatives are. The opportunity for reunion allows those hidden concerns to be heard. Without a single word of longing, all longing is expressed. What is left unsaid is presented with more concrete images and sensations—as if the author is leading you to the deepest part of your heart.
—goodreads reader
🏆Awards
2020 Eisner Award for Best U.S. Edition of International Material
2015 Comic Zone Award for Best National Comic
2016 Le Parisien's Outstanding Comic of the Year
2016 Barcelona Comic Festival Best Work Award (Nominee)
2017 Grand Comic Award
2017 Rome Comic Con Grand Prize for Best European Comic

2025-01-01

四川美术出版社

the new wave

128

9787574012806