Symptômes by Catherine Ocelot

    The opening of Catherine Ocelot’s graphic novel Symptômes is fantastic. Ocelot begins by celebrating a new episode of Grey’s Anatomy airing. She then confesses, though, to hypochondriac tendencies and illustrates all kinds of amusingly terrible maladies, to which the doctors, without fail, respond, “ok! We’re going to operate!” The scan reveals a spontaneous decomposition of his organs: we operate; a parasite is turning a person’s skin into tree bark: we operate; my eye fell out and my mom put it in a ziplock bag: we operate. The tone and style of the book is communicated so wonderfully in just a few pages it’s hard to resist its allure.

While the main character is undeniably Ocelot, a number of different vignettes comprise the whole of the novel. There are six women united by being part of, essentially, “Lonely People Anonymous.” Each tells their story and there’s a great deal of tenderness and humour in the approach, culminating with Ocelot getting surgery while the other women watch on and debate whether to smile at the surgeons, eating muffins, and then saying “hey the surgeon is looking, smile now!” and then being presented in a very funny panel with no text.

In fact, Ocelot’s visual storytelling is impeccable. First, her art style is free and easy, casual even—and yet, it looks like it was done, colour and all, with pen, which probably took far more hours than first appears. The art style also ranges from sparse to explosively surreal, but it consistently has a softness to it that elevates the storytelling. In case it’s unclear from the title, Symptômes is in French and French is not my first language, so the visuals were a great addition (or even replacement) for text, and some of the chapters were completely text-free. One short chapter shows two women standing ankle-deep in water; one woman is crying and the other woman is holding onto her. As the woman continues to cry, the water becomes more forceful and the woman hanging onto her is pulled away. The woman continues to cry and the other woman disappears under the water and is pulled away. It feels like a tragic allegory. In another wordless chapter, there are two women sitting by water while beautiful, multi-coloured ducks and birds drift by. One woman seems to be speaking about peacocks and crying and the other woman consoles her and goes through a transformative process, becoming a multicoloured bird herself until two gigantic peacocks appear before them on the horizon. In another nearly wordless chapter, a woman takes care of a house plant for a man who says nobody had ever devoted so much attention to his plant. The two sleep together and he asks her to stay the night; there’s a tenderness between them before she gets up in the middle of the night, puts on her winterwear, and leaves his house, leaving the plant she cared for framed in the window. Ocelot matches the visual style of the chapters to the stories they’re telling and, even without words, she creates such beautiful, tragic stories of loneliness, regret, and isolation.

The text and images can often pair to create the humour of the book, as well. I already mentioned the funny scene at the side of the operating table, but there’s also a scene where Ocelot is at the doctor listing things that are wrong with her. He essentially says that she’s a hypochondriac and needs to stop thinking about her body. The perspective then changes to Ocelot’s point of view. As the doctor says she needs to stop thinking about her body, you see his face and then all kinds of medical charts on the wall documenting the parts of the tongue, the foot, the upper body organs, and so on. Ocelot’s acerbic wit is just perfect comedic timing.

One of the scenes I think might resonate with a lot of people is when Ocelot voices a theory about everyone being connected by threads, reminiscent of Jane Eyre. Ocelot says that there are threads running between everyone and that’s why we have feelings of being watched or that we’re going to run into someone. The chapter follows colourful threads and builds towards a beautiful scene of her laying in a hammock made of the threads connected to others. The message is that when you have connections to many people, you’re able to rest easy in a hammock of their support. Then, you turn the page and see people wrapped in thread, being squeezed as people have trouble connecting. It’s a lovely chapter that could stand alone, but thematically works in this collection.

Overall, I really enjoyed this book. Between the art style, the clever writing, the loving care towards the characters, the humour, and the touching themes, the graphic novel has a lot to offer—not to mention that I was able to read it in an afternoon. I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Happy reading!