Amruta Patil
Nel cuore di Smog City (Kari)

ISBN 9788896317105
Pages 124
Euro 12,50

The first graphic novel from India, the success of a woman writer/illustrator, the first comic strip story with homosexuality as its subject. It is Kari herself who tells her story in 18 scenes. The space is divided into indoors and outdoors. The indoors is represented by  “Crystal Palace”, the skyscraper where the protagonist lives, with the interiors of home and office acting as a screen from the “outside”, a smog-filled, grey and rainy ruthless Mumbai, an organism with a life of its own. The first scene opens with a leap into the void, two women falling from the top floor of a skyscraper in  Mumbai, ending in a double suicide attempt. A failure for both: for one – Ruth – thanks to a protective netting, for the other – Kari – in a sewer, a sort of Styx, a muddy stream of an infernal Mumbai.  Kari, who works in an advertising agency and busy on a project for a hair care company, belongs to the Indian bourgeoisie and tells readers about her everyday life in the small apartment she shares with two girls and their respective boyfriends. The structure of the book is based on a continuous binary opposition between  Kari and Ruth, rationality and emotion.  Between the earth and air, symbolized by the mud of the sewer in which Kari resurfaces and by the plane taking Ruth to an unknown destination after her suicide attempt. Death and rebirth. Death represented by Angel, a friend and colleague of Kari and a terminal cancer patient, and rebirth symbolized by the two women who have survived and by  Lazarus, a colleague whose name, the same as that of the miraculously saved person by definition, is not a coincidence. The story comes to a conclusion with an open ending, which suggests a sequel. 

Resources

• Marie Claire on Il cuore di smog city
• Nel cuore di Smog City on Vogue
• Nel cuore di Smog City on Gioia
• Nel cuore di Smog City on Liberazione
• Nel cuore di Smog City on La Gazzetta del Sud
• Nel cuore di Smog City on Il Giornale
• Nel cuore di Smog City on Grazia
• Nel cuore di Smog City on La provincia di Como
• Nel cuore di Smog City on La Gazzetta del Mezzogiorno
• Nel cuore di Smog City on Il Piccolo
• Nel cuore di Smog City on Il Manifesto
• Nel cuore di Smog City on Lombardia Oggi
• Nel cuore di Smog City on la Nazione
• Nel cuore di Smog City on Torino Sette
• Nel cuore di Smog City on TTL
• Interview to Amruta Patil - L'Unità
• Nel cuore di Smog City on Il Piccolo
• Nel cuore di Smog City on D
• Nel cuore di Smog City on Flair
• Nel cuore di Smog City on Donna Moderna
• Nel cuore di Smog City on Minerva
• Nel cuore di smog city on Internazionale
• Nel cuore di smog city on Yoga Journal
• Nel cuore di smog city on Fahrenheit
• Nel cuore di smog city on Leggendaria