Books &Globalisation Entropy | 15 Apr 2010
Market Day
Today, local economies are being destroyed by the “pluralistic,” displaced, global economy, which has no respect for what works in a locality. The global economy is built on the principle that one place can be exploited, even destroyed, for the sake of another place.
—Wendell Berry
Wish to share – A timeless meditation on art and commerce seen through the life of an early – Twentieth Century Jewish Rug Maker.
The setting is Old World Europe, but the themes are timeless and topical in cartoonist James Sturm’s new graphic novel. – Something as common as a rug, can indeed embody the gifts and miracles of God –
Mendleman’s life goes through an upheaval when he discovers that he can no longer earn a living for his growing family doing the work that defines him—making well-crafted rugs by hand. A proud artisan, he takes his donkey-drawn cart to the market only to be turned away when the distinctive shop he once sold to now stocks only cheaply manufactured merchandise. As the realities of the marketplace sink in, Mendleman unravels.
The Artist James Sturm draws a quiet, reflective, and beautiful portrait of eastern Europe in the early 1900s–bringing to life the hustle and bustle of an Old World marketplace on the brink of industrialization.
Cartoonist and educator James Sturm turns in a tightly woven graphic novella about a shtetl craftsman whose life and livelihood shatter against the rising industrial behemoth of the early 20th century. Mendleman is a nervous rug weaver with a child on the way. His devotion to his craft brings him to the brink of art, but when he suddenly loses his major client to modernization, he finds himself, effectively, patronless. Suddenly a castaway amid economic forces that render his virtues meaningless, he collapses as his previously unnamable anxieties find specific and destructive form. Sturm’s tale comprises a day’s cycle, and the magnitude of Mendleman’s radical descent must sometimes be stated or inferred. But most of the book’s important details are effectively portrayed as part of the quotidian warp and woof of life’s patterns and relationships.
Sturm has infused his reliably disciplined storytelling style with slow pacing and spare graphics, but some bravura sequences give the story impact. The details of rural Eastern European Jewish life at the turn of the century rings true. Moreover Mendleman’s dilemma to function as a broader metaphor for the perpetual struggle between independent creativity and impersonal & brutal market forces.
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