Crazy in Love

Love wrecks everything. This is the truism at the heart of Anneli Furmark’s new graphic novel Walk Me to the Corner, translated by Hanna Strömberg. Furmark is a painter, illustrator and comic artist living in Sweden’s northern region. Her graphic novel, published by Montreal’s Drawn & Quarterly, was released this week.

Elise is a 50-something Swedish woman happily married to her partner Henrik. Having raised their two sons, the couple is well settled into domestic tranquility: swimming at their summer cabin, watching movies, making dinner and partaking in the rumpled comfort that comes from a long-term relationship.

On the surface, all appears to be placid, calm and settled. Until one night when Elise meets a woman named Dagmar at a party. A spark of attraction ignites and turns into a bonfire that burns down her entire life.

The destructive power of passion to upset the applecart is only one aspect of Furmark’s nuanced take on life, age and crazy love.

Even as she is busily blowing up her tidy existence, Elise is perpetually taken aback that at this later stage in her life, the uncertainty, embarrassment and pain of infatuation hasn’t changed one iota. She is reduced to teenage-level anxieties, riding high one moment, crashing hard to Earth in the next.

As a colleague drily notes when Elise confesses being caught between two lovers, “You do know you could lose them both.” But passion, obliterating as a tidal wave, sweeps her away, and there is no return to the safety and solidity of the shore.

There are additional complications — Dagmar is also already married, to another woman, and has two young daughters. Even though Dagmar adamantly refuses to leave her marriage and family, she still wants to carry on with Elise. When Elise tells Henrik about her feelings for another woman, he is initially supportive, but the strain proves too much. When Henrik too takes up with another (much younger) partner, the pain of her marriage ending takes Elise by surprise.

The universality of loss, lust and life is depicted with gentleness and grace in Furmark’s watercolour illustrations that pack in the good, the bad and the occasionally pretty horny reality in fluid lines and bright saturated blocks of colour. In amongst the emotional Sturm und Drang are plenty of smaller moments — a dinner party with friends, counselling sessions and long dark nights of the soul when Elise ponders her future.

Even as Elise and Dagmar drive each other slightly mad, knowing they can’t stay together and can’t remain apart, the relationship causes permanent, irresolvable changes to the people around them — family, friends and colleagues. That the couple occasionally behave like big assholes is also part of the experience. Readers might roll their eyes, wince or groan in frustration, primarily from recognition. We’ve all been there, at some point in our lives, making terrible decisions in the grip of passion.

Sometimes, the best advice comes from the least likely source. After a conversation with her grown son Felix, who offers calm and sage advice, a fragile life-raft in a sea of emotion, Elise appears to be moving towards some sort of equilibrium. Or at least it seems that way.

In the end, is the carnival ride of love, even if it turns one upside down and does the loop-de-loop, worth it? It depends on your constitution and ability to endure being flung out of the normal patterns of life, suspended in mid-air, either flying or falling. Both are possible.