The Man Without Talent
Book description
A Japanese manga legend's autobiographical graphic novel about a struggling artist and the first full-length work by the great Yoshiharu Tsuge available in the English language.
Yoshiharu Tsuge is one of comics' most celebrated and influential artists, but his work has been almost entirely unavailable to English-speaking audiences. The Man…
Why read it?
1 author picked The Man Without Talent as one of their favorite books. Why do they recommend it?
Like Kōbō Abe’s The Woman in the Dunes, this graphic novel fuses Camus’s Sisyphus with Nietzsche’s “eternal recurrence” as a test of character: would you live your life over again for eternity?
Sukezo fails the test miserably. He’s a talented cartoonist, but it doesn’t pay the bills, so he shuffles through half-hearted money-making schemes (including an aptly Sisyphean rock-selling venture), succeeding only at making himself, his wife, and his young child miserable and increasingly hateful towards themselves and each other.
Sukezo becomes the bad Nietzsche of popular misconception. If only success and esteem count, better to be nothing at…
From Donovan's list on Japanese novels that illuminate Nietzsche’s philosophy (or distort it in illuminating ways!).
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