Rabagliati is a Montreal-based cartoonist and graphic designer who has been making these autobiographical comics for several years about a guy not named Michael, but Paul. I have been reading them very piecemeal, off and on, whenever one wanders into my library system. My system has five of them, so you can see what it is like to read the (semi)-autobiography of Michel Rabagliati. He also writes in French, with what I might call European sensibilities, so while he is a sensation along the lines of Hergé (Tintin) in French-speaking Canada, he is much less known here.
This present volume was published originally in French (as they all are) as Paul à Québec in 2009, they take their sweet-assed European time getting translated, there's no hurry, we have two hour lunches to take, we have wine and espresso to get through and we need to read the Montreal papers throughly with the wine and coffee . . . and then, is there any interest in the U. S.? Can we find a publisher that even wants to invest in art/memoir comics where little happens?
So it's like all great European comics, it's 2012 before it gets published in English with a different title. In 2013 it arrives in my library system, in a library twenty miles from my house and it looks like I am the first person to crack this book 3 years later! Doesn't it feel like some story out of Nanook of the North or something, one of a lonely writer's lonely text read by one lonely old guy in Chicago? And this guy is freaking FAMOUS in French Canada, he's the Canadian TinTin!
This particular missive from the Great White North is about Roland, Paul's father-in-law, his life and dying and death, a biography that would seem to be a gift for his family, especially his wife and his one daughter who is almost silent and hardly a character throughout who emerges evocatively as a quiet character whose silent image--wearing grandpa's cap--concludes the book.
The Song of Roland, by a different author, is something English majors might have encountered in a Survey of British Literature course, maybe, though it is French, an epic poem of 11th century heroic deeds. It is the first and most outstanding example of chanson de geste, and the oldest surviving work of French literature. Themes include Chivalry, rules of battle, nurture & companionage, horses & swords, and so on.
French-Canadian Rabagliati's Song of Roland is sort of anti-epic, mock-heroic, about a regular guy who had a terrible upbringing, miraculously survived the streets to become a corporate executive, raised a few "rabbits" (what he calls his three daughters, and grandkids) and liked to play cards. Half of the book documents family get-togethers and Roland telling his life story to Paul, and the second half is about his cancer and dying and death. All feels familiar and NOT heroic. The art and story chronicle an everyman's life, as do all of the Paul stories. There are no trumpets announcing the arrival of a King. This is middle-class life, often without incident, told "without self-loathing" (I seem to recall that phrase from a blurb) as you get usually in memoir comics. You also have to go through 70-80 pages of Roland's slow dying, so don't look for a lot of laughs, but it has a sweetness to it. This memorializes what all humans have to do on this planet, as far as I can tell.
The Song of Roland features wonderfully done artwork, simple and maybe a touch sentimental in moments, but also committed to the every day. My favorite parts are the silent pages, that lift the narrative to poetry, like the breathtaking several page conclusion featuring Paul's daughter visiting Roland's gravesite and herself being visited by the ghost of Roland! (Sorry, spoiler, but as I am one of the few people who has even read this book in English--if you can trust Goodreads, and you can't--I have this feeling I am talking to 6 or 7 of us. . . .:)) Join us! I strongly recommend! But not for superhero escapes from life. This is slice of life comics. IN life, very much so.