Drawn together

If Jorge Luis Borges could sketch and James Joyce were an art teacher in the digital age, and if both had a healthier tolerance for bathroom humor, then perhaps you’d get “Vanishing Act,” by San Francisco graphic artist Roman Muradov.

The book is an 88-page meander through one evening, written in 13 parts, each depicting 13 scenes from over the course of two hours, leading up to a dinner party.

From the beginning, we know that this will not be a normal read.

A note on the second page provides 13 ways to read the book, including “With your face,” or “As a puzzle” or “Enacting each act.” Like a fantasy series, it gives you the physical geography of the night, as well as a timeline and a character guide. Except instead of Mordor, it is the modern urban “Mild Street,” around which the protagonists meander, and instead of Jon Snow, characters are art critics, cats, journalists and performers, all to varying degrees of renown.

This mix of genres highlights the concept of genre itself; Muradov is not concerned with traditional narrative arc as much as revealing as many perspectives as possible. From the literal bird’seye view, to the inside of a cameraman’s mind, “Vanishing Act” unfolds like a cubist painting, revealing how many evenings can be contained in one, depending on the way you draw it, or read it.

These slices of life come to us in 13 wildly disparate aesthetic styles. Flipping through the pages, you get the sense that Muradov assigned each

Vanishing Act

act to a different artist: Paul Klee populated act six with sleek black lines, while Olesya Shchukina collaborated with Henri Matisse to create the rain on Val Fran R., the “elm impersonator of moderate renown” in Act 12.

But we can never linger too long before being shoved into a new scene, with a new look. The effect is total uncertainty about the surface level; readers don’t know what each act will bring visually or verbally, the plot is tenuous at best and often we are forced to refer back to the beginning to remind ourselves of the cast. In many ways, Muradov’s characters are incidental, as he trains us to read in many ways, and to notice the subterranean emotional forces that govern the characters’ worlds more than other people, or the literal boundaries that surround them; forces like imagined failures, remembered poems and obscene fantasies.

Instead of trying to encompass these experiences with language, he lays an ironing board under the back of words until with enough time and heat they are pressed into images. Like brushstrokes, letters are manipulated for their shape, their texture, and language doesn’t represent, it dances and plays, capitulates to colors, and is animated by the text bubble in which it resides.

In the case of the two lovers J.R. and R.R., this takes the form of a conversation box overhanging their bodies as they talk in abstruse terms. “How many things is everything everything?” The answer comes, equally impenetrable: “One: the main thing that is the thing of everything.” Reading the words can feel like trying to translate a foreign language or dense scholarship.

But underlying the highminded language is the concern of any codependent relationship: What will happen when we are not together?

Muradov’s pages are an equalizing space where words have the same value as images, the author has no more authority than the reader, and we all, characters included, must face the same ultimate truth. Characteristically, this truth is told in the theme song to a deeply inane TV show that appears throughout the book in various forms: “And the results are in: Your life is without value. Jarry Jarry in the House of Rue, oh what will you do?”

Each story line, each aesthetic is a harmony that Muradov weaves around this refrain. His answer is his book, beautiful and multifarious; it is a revelation of how much can come from nothing. And each way we read it — from front to back, or flipping through — adds another texture to the harmony. We become co-creators, making meaning as we read.

Emma Heath is a freelance writer. Email: ebheath@ alumni.stanford.edu Twitter: @emmabheath