Monster Portraits resists review and anticipates and complicates any attempt at an adjective. I reached for 'mesmerizing' ... I tried 'magnificent' ... Finally I turned to other languages: In French one says of a moving work that it puts la vague à l’âme, a wave on the soul, and if a wave sank sharp salt teeth into one’s heart this phrase might be accurate here. Every sentence that doesn’t cut is a handle wielding the blade of the rest. Reading this was like wandering out of a dream and into an awareness of something with claws sitting on my chest.
The marriage between artwork and prose in Monster Portraits results in a beautiful book and a moving, subtle, timely meditation on otherness ... The idea that 'our world is another' is what propels the book forward. Each vignette asks questions about alienation, about the ways we divide the world into us and them, and the self-fulfilling prophecies that result.
Monster Portraits is a striking addition to this identity quilt, a broad exploration of otherness, especially biracial otherness, and specifically the otherness of Somali Americans in the 1980s ... The Samatars point out the distinction between monster and monstrous, how usually the monstrous happens to the monster ... So rather than being the cause of fear and distress, the monster is usually the victim, and the casualty of discrimination and violence. Monstrous behavior is the result of deprivation: the monster is not someone with lack of potential, but lack of opportunity ... Monster Portraits strikes gold in a genre that is entirely its own.
A prose poem with jolts of autobiography, Monster Portraits is spare and meant to be taken very slowly ... Often, you get the sense the whole monster can't be physically rendered because so much of what registers as Other is beyond appearance; the unseen is always more frightening than the seen ... This slender book plumbs a vertical field. You'll spend some time here.
Monster Portraits serves the function of philosophy, or poetry: the text makes offerings, sketches connections, and requires leaps of juxtaposition as well as freefalls into implication. Each line is a treat to be savored and allowed to meld with its companions over a slow, methodical, reverential reading experience ... I read Monster Portraits twice in a row, in one sitting, forcing myself to take it in sips each time even though I wanted to gulp.
Like anything that seems too different, too bizarre, these drawings invite intense reactions—be it curiosity, empathy, or disgust. Recommend this gorgeously strange little book to boundary-pushing artistic and literary types as well as daring dark-fantasy fans.
Issues of otherness and self run through this poetic blend of linked fiction, travelogue, memoir, and encyclopedia of curiosities by Samatar (The Winged Histories) that is as remarkable as it is perplexing ... These accounts often bleed into meditations on the nature of monstrousness in a world in which anything that is other could be seen as such.
