Kay Sohini’s move from India to New York was an escape, rebirth and reunion all wrapped in one, leaving behind an abusive relationship and broken family to start anew in the melting-pot city that already felt like an old friend because it’s where her heroes penned their most famous works.
Sohini’s debut book, “This Beautiful, Ridiculous City,” is an ode to the place that shaped and saved her. The graphic memoir shows New York as a muse, a mystical place where the lore of the city is perhaps as powerful as the place itself, if not more potent. The rotoscope-style illustrations have a broad, largely warm and slightly pastel palette. Sohini plays with form by overlaying rectangles or swirls to direct attention and add motion to the full-page illustrations.
Unlike your traditional comics, very few pages are split into panels, and even then it’s typically bisected or trisected, leaving plenty of room for rich details both in art and text.
The story starts with a brief overview of New York’s magnetism, and through its attributes we learn about the narrator. Then it delves into the recent history of India to provide context for the cultural and socioeconomic circumstances during Sohini’s childhood. Under sweeping reforms by Manmohan Singh, who would go on to become one of India’s longest-serving prime ministers, Sohini’s family sent her to a Catholic, English-speaking school to get ahead in a capitalist and Western-dominated world. She reads F. Scott Fitzgerald and Alison Bechdel while Bollywood shifts into an era of balancing East and West, old and new.
With the foundation solidly set, the memoir gets more personal, looking at a death that shook the family and an abusive relationship that nearly killed Sohini.
Rarely have I seen someone capture a feeling so well — in text or visuals — as Sohini does with New York’s beauty, and in building out the emotional landscape for each part of her life through her masterful command of form, flow and color.
“This Beautiful, Ridiculous City” is like an appetizer; it’s bite-sized, delicious, intriguing, and leaves you wanting more — apt because of all the scrumptious foods from Sohini’s childhood, and from explorations of New York’s globally representative array of cuisines that had my stomach growling throughout. While the novel felt somewhat condensed, it delivered exactly what it promised — a look into one woman’s life, centering around the city that saved her — with influential imagery serving as an emotional guide throughout.
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