This is an unusual and offbeat book in which the author combines her drawings with brief passages from Walter Benjamin’s writings.  There is an informative and interesting Foreword by Esther Leslie in which she makes the case that Benjamin’s writing evokes images, colors, and lines that move across the page (here she cites Benjamin’s ownership of Klee’s Angelus Novus, a painting in which lines move across the canvas in random ways), making his work particularly amenable to graphic treatment especially his use of aphorisms, rebuses, and miniatures.  In an introduction, the graphic artist Frances Cannon describes her “graphic literary response, her unconventional translation of his writings, and the visual echo of his work.”  Cannon also nests Benjamin not among the German literary critics and philosophers of the Frankfurt School, but among the ‘brooders, outsiders, and isolated observers wallowing in solitude and ennui’. This group includes Hamlet, Baudelaire, Duras, Plath, Bernhard, and Sebald, a group, excluding the fictional Hamlet, who would have been amazed to find themselves in the same room as Benjamin!

Since I’m reading Sebald at this moment, the wanderings of Benjamin as flaneur and the wanderings of Sebald’s character in ‘The Rings of Saturn’ nicely parallel the graphic treatment by Cannon as her pen “wanders a nonlinear path through his (Benjamin’s) catalogue of miscellany.”Cannon concludes her introduction with this invitation to the reader: “I encourage you, reader, to wander through this work. Linger, leap ahead, collect fragments along the way, retrace your steps.  Take your time.”

I did just that and while I found the drawings to often be charming and interesting, the combination of Benjamin’s fragmented writing and Cannon’s drawings didn’t quite work for me.  There were some wonderful pages like the one quoting Benjamin about the “aura of the work of art” illustrated with multiple drawings of feathers.

If you’re into graphic books or into Walter Benjamin, you will likely find this combination to be rewarding.  My guess is that this is a very small set of readers.