An Exploration of Time

 This is the kind of book I plan to keep on my coffee table when I have my own home someday. Not only is it a work of visual art, but it also feels like a memoir, a travel diary, a history book, a family photo album, a journal, and poem. Each month brings us to a new chapter of Kalman's life, where she shares the trauma of her leaving Russia to her hope for the future in following strangers and capturing their photo from the back. From the very beginning, I found her blunt explanation of Russian terror to be hilarious paired with the cartoon-like paintings on pages 5 and 6. Like many authors this semester, Kalman clearly uses her creative talents as an outlet for the hardships in her life. I found the common thread of this anxiety to be rooted in the passage of time and the realization of self identity. Pages 42 and 99 are poignant examples of these emotions, where Kalman ponders the meaning of existence and the unpredictability of the future. Kalman subtly asks these daunting questions, such as who am I and why do I matter, in scrawling handwriting and paired with colorful sketches. Her humor lies in the comparison of serious topics to visual representations of these topics that we might not expect. I thoroughly enjoyed her stream of consciousness and felt as if I had been taken on her life journey by the end of the book.