Reading Through 2021 93: The House, by Paco Roca

The House, by Paco Roca

2015, English edition 2019

Paco Roca is a sensitive man, and I'm here for it.

The cover is a pretty good summation of the vibe of the book. If you like this, you'll like the book

This is my third Roca book, following Twists of Fate and Winter of the Cartoonist. He has at least another two books I haven't read, but it's only a matter of time because I am going to become a completist. He's making a kind of comic which few others are: mature, refined stories without any manufactured melodrama. 

Roca uses strips within strips on many pages, capturing multiple small moments

Twists of Fate and Winter of the Cartoonist were both true stories, more or less. Fate was based on one man's account of WWII, while Winter was based on the lives of a number of 1950's Spanish cartoonists. The House isn't explicitly autobiographical, but the degree of detail and the similarity of a central character to Roca in age and job gives the feeling of true experiences.

The use of color is impeccable. The story shifts between the past and the present through an adjustment of the tint. Here it's more pronounced, but he uses many subtle changes as well

The book starts with the death of the elderly father of a family. His three grown children are left to take care of his rural weekend home and prepare it for sale. It begins with the younger brother (who seems to be the Roca analogue), and later introduces the oldest brother and a sister. 

While the other books of his that I've read were done in brush and ink, this seems to be done with something like a Rapidograph. I'm partial to brushwork, but Roca gets a lot of life out of his line, and his coloring manages to capture an organic, brushlike stroke. He manages to create a very clear, structured image, but still maintain a lively feel to the lines.

Color here is used to highlight how different memories are just thrown away 

The book uses a wide, panorama format, on whose pages Roca crams multiple rhythms. A page might have three or four horizontal sequences, or two horizontal sequences and one vertical. The panel layout remains intuitive to read no matter the format.

As a writer, Roca navigates a number of threads as we're introduced to these characters. The first is the relationship of each grown child to their father. The father having passed away, all are confronted with the things unsaid, the promises they never quite kept, and just accepting that a period of their lives has closed.

The three siblings themselves have a relationship dynamic that is slowly revealed through their interactions.  All three are married and show different dynamics within their own new families as well.

Another page with multiple rhythms. An elderly neighbor sheds insight on their father's experiences in his later years

All of these relationships are nuanced without veering into cliché. Perhaps the relationship of the two brothers is the simplest, as the older brother has a bitterness to him over feeling pressure to be the responsible one in the family and having to handle the most of the father's estate. Still, their dynamic manages to have complexity as they deal with their relationship to one another as well as both to their father. Both had very different perspectives on how their family life was.

A particularly nice use of time shifting as a brother remembers the view he once saw when he was a child

I was only a few dozen pages in before I started deeply considering my own life and my family. The situations Roca is portraying are all too real. He pulls out a lot of emotion from the reader by showing realistic dynamics rather than amped up ones, and that is no easy feat. The patriarch of the family is absent in the story, but his presence still weighs on everyone. All of them spent long amounts of time at this second house, but less and less as they got older. Eventually it became their father's house more than the family's house. Simply being in the house makes them recall parts of their lives long past. Not necessarily better days, but different days long gone, impossible to reclaim.

As a reader, it's hard not to reflect similarly on your own life.

Here, the present and past overlap, as a grandson remembers only a few years back

As they look after the house, they see how their own relationships have moved away from each other, and to an extent have to reckon with their own families which might someday suffer a similar fate. 

The book has very cinematic vibes, with the consistent use of space and people in it, allowing the reading of the work to be intuitive  

The book is in no way a sad or depressing, it's got some humor mixed in too. It's simply a reflective, contemplative work, recalling those times in your life when you stop for a while and survey the state of your life. The act of reading this caused me to consider my own. 

Roca writes as well as he draws, creating a space for the characters' emotional lives and for readers' emotional lives too.