Books that are obvious metaphors can be tricky. Especially if you’re not quite sure exactly what they’re a metaphor for.
I think
is Mia Oberländer’s first major graphic novel – it says it was created as part of her thesis in illustration at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences – so I don’t have any prior work to check, to see what her usual method of working is. (The edition of Anna I read was translated by a person whose name was printed, vertically, in a fussy scripty font – apologies if I get it wrong but it seems to be Nika Knight.)
In the German mountain town of Bad Hohenheim, we see three generations of women, all named Anna. Perhaps for clarity, the grandmother is Anna1, her daughter Anna2, and our blonde narrator Anna3. And we immediately think that this will not be a naturalistic, straightforward story.
Anna2, and eventually Anna3, are exceptionally tall. Extraordinarily tall, strikingly tall, unusually tall, remarkably tall, uncomfortably tall. They have gangly super-long legs and torsos maybe a bit longer than normal. They tower over all of the rest of the people in the town – even the men, I think, though the point seems to be that they’re too tall for women, and that makes them generally unattractive to men and that they stand out in a way women shouldn’t.
There’s clearly an element of feminism in this metaphor – there’s a TV talking head who has an extended sequence giving advice to exceptionally tall girls which is the clearest indication of that part of the theme – but Anna2 and Anna3 are also clearly meant to be strange for women, outside of the norms, different in an unsettling way. They can’t be feminine in the way their society expects – they’re too big, taking up too much space, gangling randomly about, clearly out of place. We see Anna2’s size being commented on when she’s still a baby, her long legs erupting from a carriage to splay all over.
Is the metaphor about women who “take up too much space” – who are too big, too dominant, too much not deferential and quietly “feminine?” Maybe, but I think Oberländer’s point is more focused on tall than big – it’s tricky to know her connotations for both words, since she originally worked in German, but height is important here.
This is a mountain village, after all. Mountains are tall. Mountains can be climbed, perhaps more easily with long legs. Tall people can see farther at the top of mountains, and may be more at home there.
Oberländer tells this story in chapters, skipping around in time. We see Anna2 as a baby, Anna1 as a young girl with a dog with equally long and gangly legs, Anna3 as a young woman telling us the story and looking for love herself. Oberländer has a conversational tone in her captions, as if Anna3 was telling us this, in fits and starts, coming back to one thread and then another, telling us her family’s history.
Oberländer tells her story in big blocky drawings, characters often seen head-on. She typically has only a few panels to each page, jammed next to each other with thin ruled borders. Her lettering is florid, scripty, a bit difficult to read to slow the reader down. The drawing, though, is much cleaner, clearer: the pictures are understood instantly, while the words take just that bit of effort.
Again, I can’t tell you exactly what the metaphor means. It may not be that precise, to have a single meaning, in the first place. It’s a story about women that stick up, that can never hide in the crowd, that are out of place where they grew up and need to make or find places for themselves. That’s the general territory: a family of women, how they interact, what the “normal” grandmother thinks and does and says when her daughter and then granddaughter are notably different, when they stick up out of normal life so much it can’t be overlooked.
