Glenn Gould- a life off tempo (6 points)

 I found this to be a pretty interesting read. I haven’t heard of Glenn Gould before, but he seemed like an interesting person. I thought having the narrative be told in a nonlinear structure was a key aspect of the story telling. I thought it made sense because it fit how Gould would recall memories after his stroke. Though I will admit I got a bit confused with who some of the characters were because of how short each recalled memory was, and how frequently each memory would move on to the next. This could’ve been done on purpose though, again to show how it is like to recall memories after a stroke. I thought another interesting aspect of the comic was the surreal/ dream like quality of some of the pages/ panels. Like in the pages where his Steinway falls out of the moving truck, and it shows how affected he was by showing him fallen to pieces. Or at the end when it transitions to showing how he has a stroke from the wrapping tree branches that look like neurons connecting each different significant memory to him. I think the comic conveyed his “eccentricities” pretty clearly by showing it and also telling explicitly how people saw him. The author shows his habits through different memories strung throughout the narrative. We get a sense of his paranoid and hypochondriac nature through the inclusion of pills and blood pressure cuff. His proclivity to feeling cold, shown through his dress. The telling is explicitly done by giving different accounts from journalists to family friends to agents to close friends and coworkers on how they saw Gould. It seemed as though his reclusive and eccentric nature made him just as notorious as his prodigious skill. I’ll be sure to check out his recordings sometime.

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