ANDY HEDGECOCK is entertained by a playful novel that embeds a fictional game at its heart
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Once upon a time in Engelstadt
ANDREW HEDGECOCK relishes visual storytelling with no respect for genres, movements or styles
[Illustration by Andrzej Klimowski]
Death comes for Liberals, entitled murder, Vatican hit squads, and fraternising with the Blitz killer
New releases from Public Image Ltd, William Basinski, and John Luther Adams
GABRIELE NEHER draws attention to an astoundingly skilled Flemish painter who defied the notion that women cannot paint like men
The Bard pays homage to Hull’s finest promoter and venue, and awards Douze Points to Laibach
KEVIN DONNELLY outlines how the bourgeois institutions inhibit our ability to to view art in revolutionary ways, and suggests some tactics to overturn it
Edifice
By Andrzej Klimowski
SelfMadeHero, Paperback, £16.99
DEMONIC eyes staring from the window of a bookshop in Ealing: this was my first encounter with the work of Andrzej Klimowski. His cover for the Picador edition of Peter Carey’s Bliss was a grotesque and baffling image realised through rotation, shade, juxtaposition and the use of sombre colour. Deceptively simple, disquieting and powerful.
Klimowski – who had already produced striking and enigmatic posters for cinema and theatre – went on to create covers for books by Harold Pinter, Milan Kundura and Dennis Potter. In the 1990s, he branched into graphic storytelling with his dark and dreamlike novels without words (The Secret and The Depository) and his graphic adaptations of stories by Mikhail Bulgakov, Stanislaw Lem and Robert Louis Stevenson.
Later, there was Horace Dorlan, a mixed-modality narrative in which text-only chapters are followed by sequences of wordless graphics. It’s a bravura fantasia involving an academic’s attempts to meld art and science while his sense of reality is under threat.
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