Edifice

(Paperback)

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Description

At the heart of the dream city of Engelstadt stand the tall storeys of an ancient apartment block, home to a nightmare labyrinth of corridors and secrets. Christmas is coming, but the mysterious disappearance of one of its tenants causes a cast of characters (or suspects) to be assembled before us. An elderly aristocratic widow plays the piano; a young mother disciplines her hallucinating son; a photographer pursues creative experiments under the magnetic spell of the moon. And meanwhile, as a dark cloud threatens to envelop the city, and caped crusaders (or marauders) wander its park, there is a film screening to attend. The eccentric Professor will surely solve the enigma on Christmas Eve... Or will he A pan-European Pandora's Box of narrative Russian dolls and Chinese boxes, Edifice builds into an Expressionist graphic vision of our archetypal, metamorphic Shadows. Whether or not "an allegory of some sort" (as one of these characters claims), Andrzej Klimowski's masterpiece of symbolic form is certainly one of the strangest Christmas stories you will ever read. "If you look carefully, you will see it."

Reviews

Klimowski is a visual genius; his gaze is always poetic, erotic, startling and compelling. * Deborah Levy *
He leads the field by a very long furlong, out on his own, making his own weather. He is Klimowski, unafraid. * Harold Pinter *
It is his mysterious graphic novels where he has arrived in the uniquely poetic world of the cine roman where the fantastic and the everyday collide so richly and in which there seems no end for him to further gloriously explore. * Quay Brothers *

Author Bio

Andrzej Klimowski studied at St Martin's School of Art in London and at the Warsaw Academy of Fine Arts, and is now Emeritus Professor at the Royal College of Art. He has designed posters for theatres and film distributors in Poland, and book covers and illustrations for UK publishers. The co-author (with Danusia Schejbal) of Behind the Curtain, The Master and Margarita, Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde, and Robot, his own graphic novels include The Depository, The Secret, and Horace Dorlan. His image of the visionary Somnambulist has been SelfMadeHero's logo since its foundation in 2007.