Black Water Lilies is a graphic adaptation of the 2017 novel Nymphéas Noirs by Michel Bussi. It came into my world via a Kickstarter campaign run by Magnetic Press, an imprint which seems to specifically focus on bringing high quality European books and artists to the US. Due to the extremely high quality of these books, I contribute to almost every project they post on Kickstarter. This book, may be the best of the lot, and that’s high praise.
The mastery behind the production of this book can’t be understated. Writing crime fiction is already a massive lift for any author, requiring precise plotting and dexterous prose to pull the reader through a story which could often be told as a few sentences in a police blotter. This difficulty is amplified in the graphic novel format where ‘showing without revealing’ is imperative. Ironically, this is also a problem for a reviewer and I want to be very careful not to spoil anything because the pay-off is simply that good.
Black Water Lilies is the story surrounding the investigation of a murder in the small French town of Giverny, the home to impressionistic painter Claude Monet. It is here that Monet painted his famous Water Lilies series. The town is a lush garden, frozen in time and exists as both a tourist destination and home to a tightly-knit population of villagers. Great care is given by Cassegrain and Duval to impress the timelessness of Giverny upon the reader, it is both the setting and a character in this tale. The village and its denizens, like the paintings, are beautiful yet fixed in time.
The protagonists of this story are three women, unwilling to accept that fate has consigned them to this small idyllic village. They fight desperately against the inflexibility of the world they find themselves in. They are water lilies trapped in Monet’s paintings.
While the adaptation and the story itself are terrific, it’s the art that really stands out.
Monet created at least 250 “Nymphéas,” paintings focused on the water lilies in his personal garden. Most were done during the last decades of his life as his health decreased and cataracts slowly dimmed his vision. The volume and variety of the paintings is tremendous and absolutely mind-blowing when viewed together:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Water_Lilies_(Monet_series)
What is so striking about the paintings is how narrowly focused and repetitive they are. Monet claimed that one needed to view these paintings collectively to understand the true essence of his subjects. A single subject might occupy a dozen paintings, perfectly focused and aligned but with a slight variation of color giving the impression of moving through time while standing still. This focus on time is crucial to both telling the story of Black Water Lilies and the comics medium in general and cements the brilliance of this adaptation.
The narration switches between the three female characters: a young girl, a middle aged housewife and an old woman. Each character is trapped in their own series of paintings delicately reflected in the narrative. The effect is dramatic. Cassegrain’s masterful use of colors reflect the stage of life each character inhabits: bright morning light for the young girl, an summer afternoon for the married woman on the verge of middle-age, and a deep resonant sunset for the old woman who has come to understand everything.
I can only assume something like this feels like the project of a lifetime: telling an amazing story that contains both the content and essence of Monet’s masterpieces. Cassegrain has painted his own series of Nymphéas for this book, both emulating and encapsulating one of the great masters. It shows. I couldn’t find much in the way of interviews or biographical information on Cassegrain but the video below shows him hand painting one of the cells of the comic at what appears to be only slightly larger than the printed page.
Who is this for?
While Black Water Lilies is specifically a crime story, it’s far deeper an more meaningful than that. It’s about time, love and jealousy. It’s about making terrible decisions for the people we love and it’s about discovering the truth almost too late to do anything about it. It’s a stunningly deep book, one I had to immediately re-read and stew over for many days. The number of books that affect me like this can be counted on my fingers and toes.
This is a book for your coffee table or “fancy” book shelf. It’s clearly deserves reading, multiple times, but as I noted earlier, the Magnetic Press editions are slick. The beautiful pages are printed on heavy glossed paper sandwiched between thick textured covers. The artwork is dynamic and eye catching and makes a great conversation piece. This isn’t going to be a great gift for a kid or die-hard super-hero comics fan, but for anyone with even a slight interest beyond the Marvel/DC shit-pipe this book is a must-have and a great gateway into the wonderful world of European comics.
You can thank me later.
Edit: Here’s a link I used for further background on Monet’s Water Lilies: https://libmma.contentdm.oclc.org/digital/collection/p15324coll10/id/85176