The Hole

Moving into a new apartment, a slim fellow discovers a mysterious hole (die-cut right through the book) that shifts unaccountably around the protagonist's new digs. He telephones a laboratory for help and is advised to bring it in. There's no menace here, just an ordinary bloke coming to accept an extraordinary manifestation. Torseter's spare pen drawings exude a quiet humor.

Moving into a new apartment, a slim, long-nosed fellow discovers a mysterious, peripatetic hole. Die-cut right through the book, the hole is indeed a puzzle, shifting unaccountably around the protagonist’s new digs, from a wall to the floor (where it trips him) to his closet. He telephones a laboratory for help and is advised to bring it in (“How…Hello?”). After much effort he captures it in a box and carries it through the city, although it meanwhile appears outside the box on each page along the way—standing in for a wheel, a traffic light, an eye. Once at the lab, he dons protective gear to watch the hole’s extensive testing by interested scientists. Finally, they archive it “for the moment”—yet it also follows him home (now it’s the moon). As he falls contentedly asleep, the hole resumes its original place in his apartment wall. There’s no Kafkaesque menace here, just an ordinary bloke coming to accept an extraordinary manifestation. Torseter’s spare pen drawings exude a quiet humor as this everyman seeks the meaning of what is, after all, a ubiquitous nothing—or anything. Other figures, including oblivious bystanders, are amusingly varied, while economically suggested interiors and cityscapes offer amusing details as well as scope for the imagination. Occasional areas of color—sunlight, cardboard tan, twilight blue—focus attention and enhance mood. A peruse-more-than-once conversation-starter that may also appeal to older graphic novel fans. joanna rudge long