Loss of Innocence

A powerful, moving chronicle of a Jewish boy coming of age in 1950s Communist Prague, Giardino's (Hungarian Rhapsody) latest graphic novel is a work of brilliant clarity and unsettling insight. Multi-page vignettes illustrate the inexorable narrowing of young Jonas Finkel's life, a process that begins in earnest with the arrest of his father in the middle of the night. Out of favor due to their bourgeois, ""reactionary capitalist"" past, Jonas and his mother are left in a world of evaporating friends, vanishing supports and denied opportunities. But mother and son share a stubborn streak, evidenced most strongly by the former's determined letter-writing campaign on behalf of her imprisoned husband. Such persistence, however, only brings more trouble under a regime that seeks to level all social, cultural and economic differences. Giardino's beautifully precise artwork presents the day-to-day dreariness of Jonah's contracting world and yet evolving adolescence in striking detail, making real the erosion that reshapes lives under the ponderous weight of totalitarian authority. Even the colors, rich and bright at the start of the story, begin to fade into sleeted blues, grays and browns by the end. With virtuousic intensity, Giardino tracks the kind of degenerative tension that increases with insidious slowness, a half-twist a day. (July) FYI: Subsequent volumes will continue to chronicle Jonah Finkel's life.