La Perdida

by Jessica Abel

Book Overview

From the Harvey and Lulu award-winning creator of Artbabe comes a riveting story of a young woman's misadventures in Mexico City.

Carla, an American estranged from her Mexican father, heads to Mexico City to "find herself." She crashes with a former fling, Harry, who has been drinking his way through the capital in the great tradition of his heroes, William S. Burroughs and Jack Kerouac. Harry is good--humored about Carla's reappearance...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0375714715
• ISBN13: 9780375714719
• Release Date: May 2008
• Publisher: Pantheon Books
• Length: 288 Pages
• Weight: 1.14 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.9" x 6.6" x 8.4"

Customer Reviews

no

better than some , not as good as others , somewhat predictable but then again arnet we all at times.

A rich exploration of the intertwining of two vastly different cultures

The quest to find one's self--that mythical, magical journey of self-discovery--is difficult enough in the country in which you were born. For Carla, our narrator and tour guide in Jessica Abel's La Perdida, it's an impossibility. Her personal journey leads her to Mexico City, a whirlwind of artistic and political endeavors, intense poverty and wealth, and the crime and drug use that spring up around both. It's also home to more than a few young American expatriates. When Carla arrives in town, she is, in theory, just there to visit her ex-boyfriend, Harry, and enjoy a short vacation. Carla, half-Mexican by birth but entirely American in lifestyle and attitude, doesn't quite fit in in this strange new land, but she knows she wants to be there. She overstays her visa, frustrating Harry, who is more than ready to see his houseguest leave.Carla is a clueless, blundering tourist when she first arrives, unable to speak Spanish and unaware of how she and her fellow Americans are viewed by the locals. She's also a bit childish, selfishly overextending her stay with Harry without permission or invitation and remaining completely nonplussed at his many entreaties for her to leave. She's more interested in boorishly studying (and attempting to emulate) Frida Kahlo than becoming truly acquainted with the culture she now finds herself living in. That quickly changes, mostly because Carla is, in ways she cannot fully comprehend, completely ready to change. She learns Spanish, finds her own apartment and meets her own friends--native citizens who educate her on Mexico's ways but may also be the wrong crowd to fall in with. There's Oscar, the drug-dealing hunk who becomes Carla's boyfriend; Memo, an outspoken cad who tries to woo Carla while also criticizing her capitalist upbringing; and, ultimately, el Gordo, leader of a drug business and a man with dangerous plans. Carla doesn't realize just how deep she has fallen into trouble until it's far too late, and it's a testament to Abel's slow styling that we the readers don't either. An opening prelude warns us of what kind of tale to expect, but after that, Abel takes her time settling in, building up Carla's persona not only as a lost soul but as foolish, impulsive and headstrong. When she comes to see herself as she truly is (and all that she has become), we feel we've earned the journey along with her. La Perdida is a rich exploration of the intertwining of two vastly different cultures joined by geography and circumstance yet existing worlds apart. Carla tries to find her place in this society, debating sociopolitical circumstances with Mexicans and Americans alike, never quite realizing just where all this blind ambition to fit in is leading her. That's the problem with coming of age: The person you ultimately turn into may not be who you wished you could be. La Perdida captures that poignancy brilliantly. -- John Hogan

A thrilling and insightful portrayal of an amazing city

La Perdida is essential reading for any American who has spent time in or who aspires to travel to Mexico's infinitely dimensioned and ever-enticing capital city. The artwork alone is riveting enough, but the sights and experiences explored throughout the book intimately echo those that would be familiar to most American ex-pats who have spent time maneuvering about the bustling avenidas of Mexico City. Perhaps the most intriguing element of Jessica Abel's story, however (and, at times, the most frustrating one as well), is its exploration of the protagonist, Carla's, struggles to construct an identity for herself amid foreign surroundings. Carla--a half-Mexican-American who speaks almost no Spanish at the beginning of the book and whose main tie to Mexico is a doting admiration of Frida Kahlo--arrives in D.F. with no sense of direction and little grasp of her own values and self-identity. Ignorantly eager to submerge herself in the "real" Mexico and to have real Mexican friends, she naïvely gets involved with the wrong crowd, and by the end of the story is only narrowly able to escape complete disaster. But, with the graphic novel's resolution, it seems that the main character has learned little from her experiences: she regards them simply as the unfortunate outcome of her callow misjudgment, the fateful assailants of her lost innocence. Carla's character continuously walks a precarious tightrope between cultural adaptability and self-respect. She desires to be open to and exempt from the quasi-intellectual idealist Memo's flagrant criticisms of capitalist America; however, by doing so she subjects herself to continuous verbal abuse that ranges in subject from her nationality to her gender. Because we see nothing of how Carla acts and behaves in her home country prior to coming to Mexico City, it is unclear weather her nonresistance to the sexist advances of several male characters is a reflection of a general lack of self-respect, or merely another manifestation of her desire to be open to people of another culture. Along these lines, La Perdida raises several questions regarding individual-versus-cultural identity...and answers few of them. Regardless, the challenge of upholding one's personal identity while surrounded by people who see the world through the lens of a different culture is a dilemma that anyone who has spent significant time abroad can probably relate to. Abel successfully explores this tension throughout this honest, realistic, and wholly enthralling graphic novel.

A Gripping Portrait of Mexico City

I first came across Jessica Abel with her Art Babe series. Although I have to admit I am not a huge fan of her drawing style, I always liked her ability to create interesting stories through well developed characters and dialogue. Her Art Babe comic abruptly stopped back, and in 2000 I remember reading that she had moved to Mexico City. So, I was thrilled, when a couple years ago, I noticed her name on the comic book shelf again. This time with, La Perdida, which was clearly influenced greatly by her time in Mexico City. Originally printed as a 5 part series that told an increasingly gripping tale about a young woman who moves to Mexico to find her roots, this book combines all 5 volumes of the into one. Although, I know this must be a fictional tale, the fact that the artist really did spend time as an expat in Mexico City surely has helped this book to be as fully realized as it is. It is filled with just the type of detail that I am sure one could only get by living there. And even if the actual events are not true to life, I have a feeling that many of the lead character's conflicting feelings and moral dilemmas are ones the author herself considered. As a result, the whole book rings true in way that is rare in comics. Too often things are either too fantastical, or too ironically detached. This one just feels true, and any fan of realistic graphic novels will definately find it worth owning.

Essential

Jessica Abel crams heaping handfuls of story into each chapter of her gripping tale of self-discovery and self-deceit, an excellent, completely engaging and essential graphic novel that belongs on every discerning comics fans' bookshelf. Carla, Abel's titular "la perdida" -- lost girl -- is a half-Mexican twenty-something who moves to Mexico City on a whim, looking to get in touch with her Mexican roots by fully immersing herself in the culture, quickly rejecting her fellow American expatriates in favor of two natives who (with a peculiar mix of selfish sincerity) embrace her: Memo, a Communist pseudo-intellectual, and Oscar, his good-looking if somewhat simple-minded friend. The first three chapters are Carla's story of trying to fit in and find her place in a culture that is completely foreign to her and not always welcoming, despite and in spite of her half-Mexican blood, and Abel does an excellent job of establishing a rather large cast of supporting characters so that in the fourth chapter, when things take a dramatic shift that in lesser hands would qualify as jumping the shark, she's able (no pun intended) to pull it off without derailing everything that's come before. Because she tells the story from Carla's perspective looking back on what happened, the reader is cued into details that Carla herself is missing at the time, so as events unfolded, I found myself cringing at some of her choices while always remaining engaged with her story. When it ended, somewhat abruptly, I found my head spinning a bit, chock full of images and anecdotes from Carla's experience as if she had shared them with me personally over coffee. Abel's artwork, dense and subtly detailed, took about 15 pages for me to get used to before I was fully drawn into the story, as the back-and-forth prologue and discordant opening sequence forced my eyes to linger on each panel much longer than I'm used to doing. There's also the Spanish-English translation that crowds many of the panels in the first chapter which adds to its density -- and also helps non-Spanish readers, myself included, to further identify with Carla's situation -- but the extra effort is rewarded throughout the story, and it quickly becomes clear why it took five years to finish the story because there's not a single wasted panel in it. Like Blankets, the first long-form (non-superhero) graphic novel to really blow me away, and Black Hole, the most recent one to do so, La Perdida is everything great sequential art should be.