Asterios Polyp

Asterios Polyp. It took me quite awhile to get into and understand this novel. I recently finished it after reading the majority of it about thee fourths through a few weeks earlier. The ending is still fresh in my mind: an asteroid hurling directly towards Hanna and Asterios as they reconcile. Why this was interesting to me is in Concept class, we are told to put our first drawing and last drawing next to each other. There needs to be a significant difference. In Asterios Polyp it begins with him having to leave his apartment due to a lightning strike. It ends with a similar disaster, but this time he isn’t alone.

The entire arc of the storyline is his journey of reconciliation with his ex-wife if it is looked at in this way. But the journey is also an important part. Throughout the book he is trying to understand how different people perceive the world. People see the world differently, and there will be things certain people notice a lot and others not at all. David Mazzucchelli demonstrates this by drawing different characters in different styles. I found this to  be very clever, easy to understand, and interesting to look at. The book is his journey of overcoming the fact that not everyone sees things the exact same way – and that’s okay.

This is  the moral story of the book in my opinion. Not everyone is going to have the same opinion as you,  or think that politics or what not as are important as you do. It isn’t wrong for them to think that way, it’s just how they think. Asterios was more logical, and Hana was more artsy. They divorced because Asterios couldn’t understand the way she perceived the world. In the end, they reconciled and all was okay. Although not with a last joke about perception on whether it was an asteroid or a shooting star.