Julius Knipl, Real Estate Photographer: Stories

by Ben Katchor

Book Overview

Ben Katchor's dreamscape is peopled by transistor radio listeners, door-knob triers, false eyebrow importers, and a late-night-perambulating real estate photographer named Julius Knipl. The vaguely... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0316482943
• ISBN13: 9780316482943
• Release Date: September 1996
• Publisher: Little Brown and Company
• Length: 112 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.4" x 10.8" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

wonderful

these haunting stories are a notch above the first julius knipl book. one can only wonder where katchor is taking us with this series. his comic stories bounce around between the panels and the reader is forced to create other stories that are only hinted at on the page. it's totally beautiful. great book for anyone into old new york, american yiddishkeit, or gorgeous comics.

For sure funny, but in a strange beautiful intoxicating way.

It's like a hilarious dream that makes perfect sense but you can't explain it, and it permeates your whole day. You have to put the book down and stare into space every little chunk or so. It's rich. I can't explain it. There's probably a German word for it.

it's humanity in a comic

I lived in New York between 1986 and 1989. Knipl's city is that city as much as it is the "Depression Era" city of a reader below's father. Katchor manages to draw timeless landscapes, give voice to people who are eternally present and asks us to dwell on topics that we would ordinarily focus on only in passing, if at all.Perhaps those who find his strip tiresome and/or irritating are those people who never think about what happens to calendar salesmen in February and simply don't care when given the opportunity. NPR was forced to stop broadcasting "Julius Knipl" because of an avalanche of complaints from the listening audience.If you have no use for or interest in the humanity that lives and works beyond the numbered avenues that are considered so important that they had to be given names too, then this book is not for you.

Ben Katchor is a genius

This is just about my favorite book. I read the review in the New York Times, which was a rave. I went out and bought it, struggled with the panels at first, but once I got the hang of how to read the narrative along with the inter-woven dialogue, I was simply entranced. Katchor's world is the world I imagine my father grew up in -- the big noisy depression-era city. Katchor has an almost surreal ability to see how unrelated events and moments are connected. Each page is a wonderfully crafted short story, and each panel drawing is packed with humor and nuance, almost as if it were itself drawn by one of Katchor's fallen characters.

Cartoons describing decay, longing, and gentle solemnity

I first heard about Ben Katchor when one of his strips had been dramatised on NPR's Weekend Edition. I was leaving Hot Springs, AR enroute for my home off the Jersey Turnpike and had just crossed out of Tennessee when the thickly accented voice of a Brooklynite seaped into the monotony of my drive. An old-time radio serial style program about N.Y.? It was so well-done, I looked for Katchor's collections but it wasn't until 2 and a half years later I found this one in Boston. It's beautiful and poignant, moving in the same rhythms of reading the estate sale announcements, collecting matchbooks and scraps of handwritten notes found in gutters and on sidewalks, assembling lives out of slow, unwitting forgetfulness. The smell of your hands after touching old quilts and photographs, the insides of old coffee tins, the way the light is in thrift stores from Vermont to Flagstaff to Portland, OR. I'm always entranced by slow decay and memory persistent in the manufactured world, preserved by the eccentric, nomadic, relentless, and discontent. This collection is necessary for illuminating the vague sensations of nostalgia and regret we experience, yet these stories are frequently undergirded by Katchor's calm Jewish faith. If this book pleases you, try and find Jem Cohen's documentary film, "Lost Book Found" which coincides nicely with Katchor's work (indeed, they thank each other in their credits). This book is most strongly recommended