A Story is actually made of two intricately entangled tales, Silvano Landi is a successful writer, who, at the age of 50, sees his family leaving him and his life harshly falling apart. Landi's great grandfather, Mauro, is an anxious soldier being fed to the maw of carnage in the First World War. Alternating between past and present, a psyche ward and the bloody trenches, and told through revealing repetition and complex clues - a lone gas station, an apathetic baroness, found love letters - a story documents the origins of pain that serve as the root of a twisted family tree and allows the reader to trace the branches. With A Story, the worldwide-award-winning cartoonist and filmmaker Gipi has created his ambitious and lyrical work yet. Shifting from scratchy black-and-white to lush watercolours (sometimes on the same page), the Italian master intertwines styles and narratives to document the pain, passion, and cruelty passed down from one generation to the next and details the fragile tightrope mankind, yesterday just as today, has to traverse to retain hope.
