Unearthly, a meditative experience. An attempt to capture grief, loss and healing in words and art that leave you feeling hurt and hopeful.

'Lightness' with words and art by Catherine Meurisse is a graphic novel memoir that is heartbreaking and funny.

Catherine Meurisse was late for work the morning on January 7, 2015. Because she was, she was not at the offices of Charlie Hebdo when two terrorists murdered her coworkers. The trauma and grief leave her in a dissociative state, and this graphic novel shows her journey during that time. From having to deal with her own loss, to the intrusion of having police escorts, Catherine tries to find her place in art and beauty again.

The author/artist is a cartoonist, so that is the style of the art in the book. It works because it is her own. The story is oddly funny at times, just like grief can be. I really enjoyed getting to read this.

I received a review copy of this graphic novel from Europe Comics and NetGalley in exchange for an honest review. Thank you for allowing me to review this graphic novel.

Not quite a memoir, but more of a personal exploration of trauma and mental health, Lightness is written and illustratedby one of the survivors of the horrific massacre at the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris in 2015. Catherine was a political cartoonist at the magazine, and would very likely have been in the line of fire that day except that she overslept, missing her bus, and arrived to the building after it had already been locked down.
Completely traumatized by the loss of her friends and co-workers, she finds herself unable to draw, and eventually, unable to remember large parts of her past. Seeking to recover her emotional health, she embarks on a journey of self-rediscovery in an attempt to remember what beauty feels like.

This is one of the most powerful texts about loss I have ver read. After working for ten years at Charlie Hebdo, the author has to work through not just the loss of friends and colleagues but the psychological loss she experiences after the tragic events that unfolded in her workplace.

A story of loss, fear, and getting out of it. This book goes to some very real places and keeps the reader captivated throughout. If you are unfamiliar with these events, I recommend checking this out.

Meurisse's Lightness is breathtaking in many ways and hollow with sadness and loss. Yet, there's so much hope and the need to understand, which makes this autobiographic comic something else. Meurisse was one of the survivors of Charlie Hebdo and an editorial cartoonist there. She loved her job, but the attack made her rethink everything and she took her time to find a new meaning to her life. She begins her journey to find beauty and visits cultural sights such as the Villa Medici and whatnot. She sees how everything in our culture is imprinted with violence, but you can still find beauty and lightness in the midst of it. Lightness is a self recovery journey and it's very thoughtful and Meurisse analyses many things and her pondering is interesting and deep. I can feel her pain through the pages and the comic is very simple and works so well. The atmosphere is everything.

The art is simple and cartoon-like. It highlights Meurisse herself and is wonky and odd at the same time considering the topic. Somehow it depicts Charlie Hebdo the best and how in everything you can have something totally different. There's hardly any color and when there is, it's always light and translucent. A perfect fit, really. The lively line art is a perfect combination with the colors and sets them apart. Lightness isn't anything groundbreaking as such, but does what it does well and with thoughtfulness. You can feel the comic when you read it and that's magic.

A raw and heartbreaking non-fiction graphic novel about grief, loss, and surviving a terrorist attack in 2015. I found the book to be moving, yet hard to read, due to the subject matter. But still definitely a recommendation from me.

A huge thank you to NetGalley and the publisher for sending me a digital copy of this book in exchange for an honest review. I truly appreciate it!

Although a compelling narrative, I could not get into this graphic novel. I suggest increasing the text size and trying to conceptualize the themes of the story more.

If you are not moved by this, I will be surprised. There is so much grief, hope, desire to be understood - it's a novel about being lost and trying to find your way back infused with the very beauty the author seeks. Without a doubt, this will stay with me for a long, long time.

It's a heartbreaking story about solitude, depression, anxiety and grief. After the events of January 07, 2017 the cartoonist Catherine struggles to find herself and to find a way to deal with the guilty she feels and the lost of her friends and co-workers. Both art and writing are poetic and beautiful. I highly recommend it.

I'm always looking for books that are engaging or educating or hopefully both for YA students. Call this one "both."

Lightness follows one of the survivors of the Charlie Hebdo massacre and how she learns to see beauty again.

I had to read this book in small doses because of the subject matte’s gravity. While the “plot” of the book can be summed up tidily, the author pulls us into her head by showing how faulty her memory had become after the attack and by tying her past to her present. She sees the attack everywhere she goes, from the police escort that follows her in Paris, to the statues in Rome, to paintings in the Louvre. She sees her dead colleagues when she experiences things they would have enjoyed.

When the attack happened, I was working at a French salon in New York. Everyone was glued to their phones in horror as the news came through (and then again at the end of the year when the Bataclan was attacked). For me as an author, I thought about what it meant that a group of cartoonists were murdered — sure, I didn’t write the same kinds of things they did, but surely I was objectionable to someone. And even if what is written really is offensive (my boss at the salon bought the first issue Charlie Hebdo released after the attack, and when he showed it to his clients, there were a few cartoons he refused to translate because “that one’s really bad”), do they deserve to die for it? And I have to admit, I was swept up in the “Je Sui Charlie” hashtag along with my writing community, because of course, that answer is NO.

The style of this book reminded me of Guy Delisle’s travel graphic novels. Story-wise, there’s not much to them, but through the eyes of the narrator, you see a place you might never go yourself — and in the case of Lightness, feel something you (hopefully) will never feel.

It was difficult an important topic. It was full of raw emotions. I loved the drawings and colors. I will definitely be recommending.

A strong, heartbreaking story about grief. Both the art and the writing is beautiful, I loved everything about it.

I was drawn to this book by the beautiful cover art. Unfortunately, that style is not representative of most of the illustrations in this book.

This is the heartbreaking story of cartoonist Catherine Meurisse who, by pure chance, arrived late to work at her job at Charlie Hebdo on the day of the horrific massacre there in January 2015. How do you continue on when your life is upended in such a tragic way? Losing close friends, your work, your sense of safety all in a heartbeat. How does an artist find beauty in the world after that? How does a cartoonist find humour? This graphic novel follows the journey of Catherine as she tries to find her way to the lightness she once knew.

This is definitely not a light read, although there is humour sprinkled throughout. 3.5 stars rounded up for this touching look at how one person tries to piece her life back together again.

Thank you to NetGalley and Europe Comics for providing me with this DRC.

So dire has the world situation been, even on the smallest levels, that the massacre of the Charlie Hebdo staff seems like it happened at least a decade ago. But it’s only been three-and-a-half years and there’s been much blood under the bridge since that has elongated our perception of time. That’s a privilege that I and many others have, that by not being direct victims of such horror and by having recurring opportunity to tune out of the barrage of nightmares that are reported, I can put the worst moments in the world at a distance in order to save my own sanity.

But to those who are there, an eternal present can haunt them, indeed torture them, and the path to escape that psychological prison is not an obvious one.

That’s what French cartoonist Catherine Meurisse documents in her memoir Lightness, which depicts her emotional state following the Charlie Hebdo murders and her efforts to deal with what she witnessed. Meurisse arrived late to work one day to witness the two gunmen fleeing from the office, and taking refuge in the theater next door where she and others had to process what had just happened.

The processing didn’t end with that day and it certainly doesn’t end with this graphic novel. Meurisse makes that plain as she shows how the minutiae of reality bring back reminders of what transpired, the little details that stick in her mind spurred on by innocuous words spoken that the speaker could never know makes such a mark in her psyche.

Aside from the trauma, Meurisse also shows how the nuts and bolts of being a survivor of such an incident affects the way you encounter the world, specifically in her case with a constant police escort to protect her should further attempts be made. Her guards become the ghosts of the horrible scene, accompanying her everywhere and reminding her of what happened. They are the manifestation of the emotional and psychological weight that bears down on her.

Another unexpected burden that Meurisse must grapple with is the idea that the tragedy quickly belongs to everyone, that it becomes a symbol of wider issues and even a personal matter to those with no involvement. How do you grieve when the focus of your grief becomes co-opted?

Eventually, Meurisse decides that the only way for her to heal is to step outside the world that was so throttled by horror and into a more bucolic setting that allows her to let her mind become awash in art history. It’s there that she makes further connections between the circumstances of art history and the work of Charlie Hebdo, and the subject matter of that history and its place as a slice of never-ending horror that moved into the Charlie Hebdo murders and then past it, into further, nightmarish incidents.

Meurisse’s conclusion is the only one that anyone could ever have — grasping for the light, even in the smallest portions, in order to cast away the darkness as best she can — but that’s partially the point of her challenge. Part of the job of a Charlie Hebdo cartoonist is to face the darkness, react to the darkness, depict the darkness, challenge the darkness, interpret the darkness, embrace the darkness. And that’s hard to do when you have to escape the darkness.

Part of the purpose of Lightness is to explore Meurisse’s relationship to darkness in the context of her trauma, of her extreme sense of loss. She does that with a Charlie Hebdo sensibility that no doubt comes naturally to her after a decade in those offices. She jokes about the murders and the murderers, about the victims, about the larger implications of the incident. She speaks to the dead and these conversations aren’t somber. She is coping.

Darkness is a coping mechanism, as many of us know, but it is balanced by light. We need both of those to heal, though neither may heal us permanently. It’s really amazing to me that Meurisse can share not only a story that is very personal, very revealing, very raw, but does so in a way that puts her right out there, vulnerable. I admire her for being able to do that so honestly.

This is a perfectly honourable book from a survivor of the Islamic attack on "Charlie Hebdo", who was delayed in arriving at the offices that fateful morning. But that doesn't make it a good book – it's actually quite pretentious, and despite being peppered with decent, telling cartoonish bon mots about the author's thinking, didn't really amount to a great deal in my mind. I've certainly read more telling, emotional and entertaining books – but not much more Pseuds' Corner-bound than the awful introduction. A great shame, all of it, from inspiration to reading.

Really beautfiul drawings that accompany the messages of grief and trauma. The colours match well with the raw emotions of the author. Overall, I enjoyed reading the story, but I found the font a little difficult to read. It would have been easier to read with a clearer font.

Inhalt

Nach den Anschlägen auf Charlie Hebdo hat die Cartoonistin Catherine Meurisse alle Freude am Leben verloren. Immerhin hätte es auch sie treffen können wie ihre Kollegen – wäre sie an dem Tag früher aus dem Bett gekommen. Nun ist ein Großteil ihrer Freunde, ihrer zweiten Familie, einfach tot. Und sie muss lernen, die Leichtigkeit und Schönheit in ihrem Leben wiederzufinden. Zwischen Identitätskrisen, der Trauer und psychischen Schäden, jagt sie den großen Künstlern und Philosophen nach, auf der Suche nach einem Weg, um wieder frei leben zu können.

Meine Bewertung

„Lightness“ ist ein Titel, den ich auf Deutsch schon länger auf meiner Wunschliste stehen hatte. Ich erinnere mich heute noch an die Fassungslosigkeit, die nach dem Anschlag auf Charlie Hebdo herrschte, auf die Momente, die ich vor dem Fernseher verbrachte und die Solidaritätsaktionen betrachtete. In denen ich mir dachte: „Bringt das etwas? Hilft es den Betroffenen, den Hinterbliebenen, sie noch stärker ins Rampenlicht zu drängen, wenn ihre Liebsten so grausam ums Leben kamen?“ Catherine Meurisse hat die Anschläge nur aus dem Nachbarhaus mitbekommen – und hat ihre Erfahrungen in „Lightness“ mit der Welt geteilt.

Dementsprechend neugierig war ich natürlich, den Comic nun zu lesen. Was würde mich in „Lightness“ erwarten? Wie geht jemand mit der Situation um, nachdem das Einzige, was ihr das Leben rettete, eine durchwachte Nacht wegen Liebeskummer war? Bald fand ich eine Antwort darauf: Gar nicht. Wie soll man schon mit solch einem Trauma umgehen? Die Zeichnungen waren ein guter Ausdruck für ihre Hilflosigkeit, für das Gefühl der Schockstarre, allerdings hatte ich an vielen Stellen das Gefühl, nicht genug zu verstehen, nicht tief genug eintauchen zu können in ihre Gedankenwelt.

Während ich irgendwo oberflächlich blieb, machte sich die Autorin auf die Suche nach der Leichtigkeit, die ihr seit dem Anschlag gefehlt hat. Ihr Trauma konnte ich noch einigermaßen nachvollziehen und auch irgendwo mitfühlen, aber spätestens dort verlor sie mich ein wenig. Die philosophischen Überlegungen kamen nicht recht bei mir an, und auch ihr Weg aus dem Trauma heraus war für mich wenig nachvollziehbar. Dass man es wohl nie komplett loswird, kann ich hingegen verstehen, und auch die Gefühle bzw. die Abwesenheit davon, die ihre Illustrationen rüberbrachten. Es muss eine unheimlich schwierige psychische Situation sein, in der sie sich da befand. Vor allem, wenn es darum ging, das nächste Heft rauszubringen, nachdem ihre Freunde und Kollegen gerade erst gestorben waren.

Alles in allem war „Lightness“ definitiv keine leichte Kost. Aber damit habe ich ja auch nicht gerechnet. Ich finde, man muss diesen Comic mehrfach lesen, um es wirklich nachvollziehen zu können, um richtig in die Situation einzutauchen und auch die philosophischen Anteile zu durchdringen. Für Interessierte ist es definitiv lesenswert, ich schwanke noch ein wenig hin und her, ob es mich nun überzeugt hat oder nicht.

An interesting story with attractive typography and artwork. An important subject matter and good use of colour.