Kari, the Lone Soldier
10 April 2014
Kari. Not your everyday girl. Kari starts her story by committing suicide, a lover’s plight. Kari was also my first dive into the world of graphic novels. Amruta Patil’s Kari takes us into the deepest layers of a melancholic world, a world belonging to no one else but the protagonist herself, primarily at least. Philosophical musings about life, death, the other world, herself and the various people she meets encapsulate the broody enigma of a graphic character, quite unlike any other. She is no super hero brandishing her sword, she is your average human, extremely simple, harrowingly complex.
Kari, in its entirety, is not exactly a story but poetry in motion. She delves deep into her loneliness, the smokiness of the smog city she lives in, her odd job as a copy writer, her lover Ruth who fled, and the sewers; especially the sewers, those which saved her life. Sometimes funny, otherwise wry and critical of the hollowness of everyday nothingness, this fiction book is the facts we live and try to control. Only with Kari, she lets it be, she lets it loose and it spreads, uninhibited, across the pages of this delectable carousal. Kari is floating across as I write.
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