TAN's The Arrival: Discussion Questions

With The Arrival we come to the list’s most literal interpretation of The Stranger, not only in the hero's story of immigration to a strange new land, but with the graphic form itself: devoid of known languages, inviting us as readers along on the experience.

I heard Shaun Tan speak this past June at the enormous & excellent Sydney Writer’s Festival.

He came across as funny, candid & totally unpolished, a very likable, humble fellow, who talked about the four-year process of producing the 120-page, unnumbered The Arrival. Shy of over-burdening his family & friends, he used himself as the model for the principal character.

(There was a funny moment during his talk when someone in the audience asked him who he’d used, while Shaun Tan—standing right there, not far away—looks just about exactly like his character).

To find the most fluid movements & natural expressions, Tan assembled some of his panels from stills taken from video. He’d go out in his backyard, say, wearing a hat & long coat, set the camera rolling & then pick up a suitcase, walk a few steps, put it down, look up. He’d draft his friends & family to perform similar sequences, over & over again. His neighbors, who held to varying degrees of understanding what he was doing, would sometimes watch him in his yard.

His Chinese father immigrated from Malaysia to Australia in 1960. Tan grew up in Perth, where he was in different ways both a born-&-bred native & a stranger there himself. In part the book is inspired by his father’s stories, but The Arrival is far more universal.

Some images are adapted from people he’s interviewed. Some are taken directly—& recognizably—from sepia photos of Ellis Island. Others are based on things like a Tom Roberts' painting of a migrant ship bound for Australia, ‘Going South'. One of the project’s many origins was in the double-page illustration near the start—titled “The Old Country”—of dragon tails looping through a city, the family walking below. He didn’t know what it was about, but he wanted to find its story.

Tan’s excerpted essay HERE--found at the bottom of the page under “Comments on The Arrival”--is worth reading & pertains to our theme.

Shaun Tan has won the Australia’s prestigious New South Wales Premier’s Literary Award for 2007 (a true feat for a wordless book) & the World Fantasy Award for Best Artist. Since its US release in October 2007, it’s enjoyed such popularity that it was hard to find on shelves over the holidays.

Have fun discussing this one! I’ve included a short note about approaching Midnight’s Children at the end.

--A. Campisi

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Discussion Questions & Suggestions

• Favorites. Which is your favorite illustration or detail & why?

• Strangers. What does it mean to be a Stranger here? Discuss our hero’s challenges toward finding himself at home in a strange land.

• Alienation to Home. That's a basic arc here. What are the crucial events & elements that eventually allow him to transition from total alienation to finding himself more at home?

• Cross-overs. For all his adaptation & assimilation, what (if any) images follow him from his Old Country to the New?

• Readerly Empathy. Discuss the specific ways the form puts the reader in the hero’s shoes, as it were, making us better empathize with the protagonist / immigrant’s experience. Which did you feel were most affective?

• Universality. A single immigrant’s story can’t be entirely universal, though the book makes a good faith attempt. What are some of the assumptions & choices it makes with respect to the immigrants themselves, the Old Countries, the New Country, the decisions to leave, and being a Stranger?

• Transitions. One of the geniuses of this book is Tan’s ability to transition (wordlessly!) into & out of other people’s stories, fluidly changing narrators / point of view & even tense. The blond grocer tells our hero his story, for example, fleeing The Giants with big boots, vacuuming people up. The old man at the assembly line also tells his war story. Talk about that technique & those side stories.

• The Fantastic. Elements of the aliens lands are merely different shapes (hats, stamps, snowflakes). Others are alien but guessable (food, animals, the postal system). Still other fantastical & allegorical (dragons, giants). Tan tries to walk a fine line between giving us something at once familiar & simultaneously alien. He’s snowed the protagonist (& us!) with elements we don’t recognize & yet must navigate. Talk about the use of surreal or fantastic imagery.

• Other Choices. What other authorial choices did you find particularly interesting? Were there moves that didn’t work for you?

• What is it? What do you think of this form: a wordless graphic novel? Is this book for adults? Kids? Is it literature? Do you think it deserved to win a general literary award in a category including all traditional books of adult literary fiction?

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A Note for Approaching Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children

This book won the Booker of Bookers, judged to be the best Booker Prize winner in the award’s first 25 years.

1. Start reading now.

This is a fantastic book, in all senses of the term. Rushdie writes some incandescent prose, imagery dense, intensely erudite, lyrical & passionate. It's not without flab, but what's good is well worth the extra pages. Suffice to say, this is not a book you can happily rush through in the last week without missing some crucial points & real gems.

2. With this book in particular you might find it fruitful to keep an eye out for short passages as you’re reading—say, between a sentence to 3 pages or so, settling on a single image, exchange or event—then do a very close reading of your selection & bring it with you as a personal contribution to the meeting.

CHABON's The Final Solution: Discussion Questions

“He sat up, his head cocked at an angle that among parrots would have signified mild sexual arousal but that among apes denoted vigilance.”

(Bruno the parrot, in Michael Chabon’s The Final Solution)

In 1893, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle wrote a story called “The Final Problem,” in which the author plunges Sherlock Holmes over a cliff to his death.

Strangely (if not surprisingly), this didn’t take.

Doyle was weary of Holmes as a fixture in his life & as the definition of his career. However, as Star Trek fans may understand better than most, Doyle was totally unsuccessful in killing off his fictional character, who by then had taken on a life & fame quite independent of his maker. Outraged fans rallied for Holmes' resurrection & Doyle spent much of the next two decades churning out Sherlock Holmes stories. As a writer, I find this failure intriguing. And very alarming.

So it’s one final game afoot for The Old Man, as Chabon calls him, disinterring the ancient sleuth from obscurity & dereliction as a Sussex beekeeper. It came out in 2004, along with a shelf-load of other Holmes books, when the great detective turned 150.

But this is Michael Chabon [also HERE], so it’s not purely an homage to Holmes / Doyle. In The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, for which he won the Pulitzer Prize, he also addresses the sorrow & horrors of Hitler’s Final Solution. Holmesian mystery or not, Chabon's The Final Solution is at least a timely study of social red herrings—specifically issues of security (eg: defense codes) & profit (eg: bank account numbers)—that distract from basic human tragedies.

At heart this is a book that asks: What is worth remembering?

So it's not just an homage. Neither, as some complain, is this truly (or purely) a work of genre fiction. In this respect Chabon is no snob: he's a writer who uses anything that works. His writing here flirts with a Victorian voice. Sometimes his phrases can seem shaken in a Boggle box & laid out as they fall, a sentence gambling on for a paragraph. But that’s quintessentially Chabon: super-energetic images; quirky characters; red herrings; a romping plot; erudition; tongue-twisting vocabulary; great pathos; The Human Condition. A willingness to pass the point of view to a parrot.

Here are some suggestions for discussion. As you’re talking about “The Arrival” as well, I’ve given you fewer than usual. I’ll append a note on approaching Rushdie’s book in the next post. Enjoy!

--A. Campisi

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Discussion Questions & Suggestions

• During your meeting, just for fun, consider dropping at least 2 of the following Chabonian words in casual conversation.

Extra points for accuracy, topicality & straight faces.

.Ignis fatuus (pl. ignis fatui) .......Tatterdemalion

.Echolalia.......Bibulousness

.Dryasdusts.......Mundungus

.Aspergillum.......Gephryrophobia

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• If you didn’t know in advance, how long did it take you to recognize who the old man was? What were your clues?

For example: "Then he reached into the old conjuror's pocket ... and took out his glass. It was brass and tortoise shell, and bore around its bezel an affectionate inscription from the sole great friend of his life" (29)

• What did you think about never naming Holmes?

"Years and years ago his name -- itself redolent now of the fustian and rectitude of that vanished era -- had adorned the newspapers and police gazettes ... " (43).

• Separately, what did you think about calling him The Old Man, the only unnamed principal character? What effect did it have on your reading?

• The Title. Talk about the various meanings & references contained in the title.

• The Mysteries. So the old man solves his mystery with signature alacrity & style: He finds Bruno & reunites him with the boy. But that’s not the only game in town. Why is he so intrigued as to rise again to this particular mystery & not to the one that everyone else is trying to solve?

• The Train Song. “The sound of the train song, arising in the middle of the night, would jar the man from his slumber, send him scrabbling for his pencil & pad.” (117, Harper Perennial Edition) (This is my favorite page in the book.)

What is it that’s worth so much to remember? Answer the book’s other mystery: What is the parrot actually singing?

• Revealing Errors. What do people think Bruno is singing with his German strings of numbers? What’s the basis for their various theories? Why don’t any of them guess the real answer? What’s the social commentary contained in those specific errors?

• The Ending. What did you think of the ending, which does not spell out for you in so many words the answer to the mystery?

What do you make of it when the old man says at the end, "I doubt very much ... if we shall ever learn what significance, if any, those numbers may hold" (129).

• Illustrations. What meaning or clues, if any, did you find in the illustrations?

• Talk about the Panickers. Their name. Their racial mix. Their family dynamics. Their marriage. As foils. In context of the greater social themes of the book’s Zeitgeist.

• Mr. Panicker "... his shame was compounded by the intimate knowledge that Richard Shane's brutal murder in the road behind the vicarage had echoed, in outline and particulars, the secret trend of his own darkest imaginings" (94). What are Mr. Panicker's 'darkest imaginings'? Why is he so tortured?

• The Stranger. Talk about the old man in terms of our theme. How is he a stranger, how is he estranged?

• The Stranger. More importantly, talk about the boy in terms of our theme. How is he a stranger, how is he estranged?

• Selective Mutism. Why doesn’t the boy talk? Clearly his youth & his not speaking are at least a device to enable & preserve the mystery. What else does it add to the story?

• The Writing. How does Chabon’s distinctive style strike you? How would you describe it? Examples of what you liked / didn’t like & why?

• Bruno. What did you think of the chapter that slid into the parrot’s point of view? Why did or didn’t it work for you? What did it accomplish, do you think, that it could not have accomplished as well with a human perspective?