Suddenly, loneliness is everywhere. Some people are writing about it, and some are making it the subject of films. Meanwhile, others are simply trying to cope with it, just as they’ve always done. Hubert, which marks Ben Gijsemans’s debut as a graphic novelist, is also about the isolation that comes with city life. However, this beautiful, moving book isn’t only about what it is like to be too much alone; to turn its almost wordless pages is briefly to replicate the experience. The deafening silence of its frames are at moments as crushing as lead.
Hubert is a middle-aged man with a poignant jawline and pitiable glasses. He lives in a tiny flat in Brussels (Gijsemans is Belgian), and spends his free time, of which he seems to have a lot, visiting galleries, standing in front of his favourite pictures – he loves paintings of beautiful women, like Manet’s Olympia – as if before a shrine. Sometimes, he visits local museums; on other occasions, he goes further afield to Paris. In between, he talks to almost no one. When a stranger begs a lift, he is tongue-tied; he has lost the habit of small talk, if he ever had it in the first place. In the evenings, his landlady calls out to him, begging him to join her for a bottle of wine. But while Hubert’s loneliness has made him timid, her isolation reveals itself as neediness; it makes her foolish. Her attempt to seduce Hubert scares him off. He prefers the girl he can see from his window, who lives in the apartment opposite. Her great virtue, of course, is that she is silent, unreachable. Their worlds will never collide, and for all his pining, for Hubert this is perhaps a relief.
This is a wonderful book, and I want everyone to read it. Its emotional and visual economy is extraordinary, Gijsemans showing such (precocious) daring when he devotes six, nine, even 12 frames to the smallest ceremonies – to the eating of supper, say – so that we get a sense of the way Hubert uses up his time, as if it were a loaf of stale bread. His drawings, washed out but somehow lush, too, are so tender and telling, from the doleful curve of Hubert’s back to the workaday treads of the stairs – up and up they go – in his apartment building. The interiors make you think of Larkin’s poem Home Is So Sad (“It stays as it was left,/Shaped to the comfort of the last to go/As if to win them back”).
Hubert’s tiny flat is his shell, protecting him from the world. But it’s also a mark of a certain kind of failure, what the poet called “a joyous shot at how things ought to be/ Long fallen wide”. These walls can’t talk, but they seem to judge him, all the same.
Hubert is published by Jonathan Cape (£16.99). Click here to buy it for £12.99
