"Fun Home"

Alison Bechdel's 'A Family Tragicomic' is full of seamless allusions and metaphors. On the very first page, we are told that in circus terminology, acrobatics where one person lies on the floor balancing another are called "Icarian games" - such as the 'Airplane' game in her childhood. Then:

• He was an alchemist of appearance, a savant of surface, a daedalus of decor.
• I grew to resent the way my father treated his furniture like children, and his children like furniture.
• It's true that he didn't kill himself until I was nearly twenty. But his absence resonated retroactively, echoing back through all the time I knew him... the converse of the way amputees feel pain in a missing limb.
• My embarrassment on my part was a scale model of my father's more fully developed self-loathing.
• My course lay between the Scylla of my peers and the swirling, sucking Charybdis of my family.

Symbolism and significance can be found everywhere you care to look:

• Snake: obviously a phallus, yet a more ancient and universal symbol of the feminine principle would be hard to come by. Perhaps this undifferentiation, this nonduality, is the point.
• The mailman who lifted a toddler 'dad' from mud: I always pictured Mort as a milkman, all in white - a reverse grim reaper... the story's bizarre, grimmsian climax: then (grandma) wrapped him in a quilt and put him in the oven (to warm him up)
  
• Two photos of their youth compared: the exterior setting, the pained grin, the flexible wrists, even the angle of shadow falling across our faces - it's about as close as a translation can get.

Proust:
__ We stopped for a moment by the fence. Lilac-time was nearly over; some of the trees still thrust aloft, in tall mauve chandeliers, their delicate sprays of blossom, but in many parts of the foliage which only a week before had been drenched in their fragrant foam, there remained only a dry, hollow, scentless froth, shrivelled and discoloured.