“This is not ‘the Next Book’, but rather a self-indulgent side-project — a simple travel diary drawn while I was traveling through Europe & Morocco from March 5th to May 14th, 2004.”
It’s a canny move, saying right up front that it’s not his “Next Book.” Blankets was a genre-busting success. It won comic awards & wound up on dozens of comic & non-comic “Must Read” lists. As a 500+ page coming of age/struggling with religion story, it was the “graphic novel” that non-comic readers loved. His next book, whatever it was, was guaranteed to be sensation, this time burdened with expectations of greatness.
Carnet is a travel diary — a one-day-at-a-time record of the places Thompson went, the people he met & the emotions he was feeling. Mostly he was feeling loneliness, as he’s just out of a relationship, in that phase where you’re still partially in it. Compounding the usual loss of a break-up is his ex-girlfriend’s (unexplained but seemingly serious) illness. So, alone & self-conscious of his loneliness, Thompson spends large parts of his trip achingly desperate to fall-in-love.
And he does, many times. And the one time it’s returned, well, I don’t want to give away the end.
The travel diary is a genre ideally suited to the graphic novel. Likely one of the reasons Thompson downplays Carnet is because it lacks a straight-ahead, novelistic narrative, like the one that drove Blankets (or that drives something as formally inventive but narratively traditional as Mazzuchelli’s brilliant Asterios Polyp). Most of the comics that make the jump into “graphic novel” status — and into the hands of non-comic readers — follow standard novelistic tropes. A travel diary isn’t burdened by these conventions. Its only through-line is travel, the experiences of new places, new sights & new people. As such, every page can be something new and no two pages need to follow the same rules.
Thompson takes full advantage of this freedom. Carnet features full-page, beautifully-detailed drawings, cartoony caricatures, instructions on how to make cheesy French sandwiches and standard, panel-bound comic book pages. In its visual eclecticism Carnet feels like a sketchbook, until you realize how well the pages “work.” While he jumps around in style, each page is laid out to both read in a glance and hold up to longer inspection. A sketchbook would have mistakes, scribbles and marginalia. Carnet is composed and beautiful. It’s a travel diary made by a master cartoonist.
Thompson’s “Next Book” turned out to be Habibi, which is massive & detailed and every bit a successor to Blankets. It’s a treat to dive into such an ambitious story and painstakingly rendered world but that’s not always what, as a reader, I’m in the mood for. Often I just want to piggyback on someone else’s adventure — someone not too different from me, on an adventure I might still have one day. It’s fun to imagine falling in love with beautiful strangers in other countries and inspiring to think that I might come out of it with a book like this.
For me, that’s Carnet de Voyage. Inspiring, escapist, and achievable. Now I just need a girlfriend so that she’ll break up with me.