Improbable Infant Survival: The baby girl Zoe gives birth to is perfectly healthy, even despite the beach’s conditions.Express Delivery: Zoe, one of the rapidly aging children, ages into a teenager, winds up pregnant after having sex with Louis, and swiftly delivers a baby girl.The last scene shows her building a sandcastle. Zoe and Louis’s daughter is the last surviving person, though in the body of a 50 year old and will inevitably age to death as well. Downer Ending: Everyone inevitably dies of old age on the beach.Night Shyamalan wrote, directed and produced the graphic novel’s film adaptation, Old. Soon everybody is growing older-every half hour-and there doesn’t seem to be any way out of the cove. Then there is the odd fact that all the children are aging rapidly. It’s a perfect beach day, or so thought the family, young couple, a few tourists, and a refugee who all end up in the same secluded, idyllic cove filled with rock pools and sandy shore, encircled by green, densely vegetated cliffs.įirst there is the dead body of a woman found floating in the crystal-clear water. It was initially published in France, before being translated into English by Nora Mahony and released in the United States in 2013. We are already, as a people, so very arrogant.Sandcastle is a French-language Swiss sci-fi mystery graphic novel written by Pierre Oscar Lévy and illustrated by Frederik Peeters. Even for those who believe they know about life and death and afterlife and afterdeath, the privilege to reconsider the limits we’re born with is a gift that should not be squandered or abdicated. These parables surround us, whether in reading Shelley's "Ozymandias" in junior high or in the kingdoms we build as children in the sand, but we are-as a species or as a culture-so prone to forgetfulness and distraction that reminders, even obvious ones, can be welcome. Sandcastle is one more opportunity to prompt our thoughts toward consideration of our mortality and if there can be any meaning in it. Peeters, whose art is full and lively, describes the book as a parable. The characters are rather typical, but that allows us to investigate the typicality of their conundrum. Lévy and Peeters offer a neat entry into their discussion of the human end, lubricating the conversation by its relevancy and immediacy. Sandcastle is thoroughly invested in the human dilemma-that bit of story that takes place in between plot points. Partway through, however, readers will begin to sense that the plot, the story, the mystery, and whatever climax awaits is probably beside the point. It’s an exhilarating ride and well worth the ticket paid. Lévy and Peeters grab hold of one’s attention deftly and don’t show any concern with offering relief until the book’s final curtain draws closed. The reader’s first pass is going to almost inevitably be wholly invested in the question of Holy Crap What Is Happening?! The book is written and drawn with judicious tension. Sandcastle, like most Twilight Zone episodes, is heavily plot driven. Sandcastle is no different, and by collapsing those decades and years and months and days and hours of potential meditation into the span of a day or less, authors Frederik Peeters and Pierre Oscar Lévy force the issue rather neatly. Those years and years of intermittent contemplation may bring us to peace or push us toward existential horror, and that’s what centuries of literature helps us explore. One of the saving graces of the human experience is that without the intervention of some terrible accident (injury or disease or murder), we all get at least six decades to gradually make sense of the whole tragic mess. The fact that we will all die pretty much sooner than we’d prefer motivates (even if only subconsciously) so much of our narrative displays-and of course our real-world actions as well. In fact, most stories can in some sense be read as an exploration of our perishable nature, of our inevitable expiration. Books about the mortality of the race are not rare.
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