The Arrival
I first read Shaun Tan’s The Arrival at a close friend’s house, when I dropped by unexpectedly one day. I took off my rain gear and threw it in a pile with my book bag by the door and went to the couch by the window, where I lay down. For a few weeks, I had been feeling quite peculiar, like something very important was suddenly different, only I couldn’t tell what exactly it was. I didn’t at all feel like being at home, so afternoons I would wander around until I wound up somewhere.
I imagine I was not very good company just then, and certainly I was not very good conversation, so when this friend of mine saw me there on the sofa, went to her room, and returned with The Arrival, which she dropped in my lap without a word, I think it’s quite likely she was simply giving me an activity so I wouldn’t just sit around being a royal bum-out. It turned out, however, that this was just the thing I needed, and it so happened that it appeared in my hands at precisely the moment its effect would be most potent.
The Arrival is one of my favorite books of all time, period. These 400+ lithographs, all of which are intricately, fabulously, and elegantly lovely, are like sepia daguerrotypes of another world, or like each frame of a silent film fantasy laid out in order on the page. It is the story, in pictures, of a man out-of-place in a new world he is struggling to fathom, and it is a sovereign tonic for certain types of mild, nameless dysphorias. It is evidence that something, at least, has gone right with the world.
Make tea, sit by the window, and read this book. Read it, spend some time with with it, then read it again.
Available at Logos:
The Arrival by Shaun Tan
$19.99
s of the best and the worst that publishers offer. We visit people’s homes and storage units to pick through their libraries; we attend trade shows to search out just that book that no one would ever expect to find in any store in Santa Cruz.
