Ballad For Sophie
By Filipe Melo and Juan Cavia (illustrator)
Ballad For Sophie is one of the most visually impressive graphic novels I’ve ever seen. Juan Cavia’s illustrations give the book an artistic style, echoing its writing and bleeding color into the musician’s already colorful life. Filipe Melo’s story flies through the pages like a concerto, filling the already beautiful book with a nuanced life that never feels overly saccharine or unearned.
Cavia’s designs give the feel of an effortless sketch, full of detail without being edited away from the illustrator’s intent. It’s as if the characters walked directly from his designs into their scenes. Everyone looks distinct, while nationalities, family trees, and political alliances hold to a uniform, making them identifiable among the unique faces. For a semi-grounded story about musicians surviving World War II, the magical realism feels planted solidly in the world. Anything that doesn’t fit how we might see it is tossed aside as the subject’s memory being faulty in age, illness, and medication, heightening certain moments the reader has to assume are true regardless of the unreliable narrator. These magical life events are breathtaking, partially due to the story telling, but also due to the convincing imagery. The entire novel reads as one might imagine a musician sees the world. It is at times full of bright colors in an almost sinister brightness, other times dark and cold, with a more outright dread.
Stories told during the second World War will either be unique in their point of view for one of the most told eras of human history, or come across as a carbon copy of those that came before them. Melo writes a sympathetic character who hates himself for his involvement, however incidental and altruistic, in the atrocities of time. The main character, Julien Dubois, has complicated relationships with his mother, his music, and in much deeper ways that he usually can’t understand, himself. The titular Sophie acts as a wonderful framing device, convincing the reader of Dubois’ celebrity history to the point that I forgot he was a fictional character at times, while weaving herself between his reflections, making her as much a part of the story as he was. Her sympathy humanizes the man, who is not unsympathetic, but without her he might’ve just come across as bitterly wasting away
Everything about this graphic novel, from the illustrations, to the characters, and the decades long story, is beautiful. There is no higher compliment I can give than: it should be taught in high school. Not as required reading for the holocaust, but as an alternative to how other perspectives can be told alongside the more vital stories. For those readers who are interested after reading something like Maus, but want to see the larger context of the world around that story of trauma through the same format. There is quite a bit of sex and nudity depicted within, enough drugs to kill a large animal. Perhaps this is reserved for college courses covering similar subjects and if a highschooler grabs it off the shelf, I won’t stop them.
I would be remiss without mentioning that the actual Ballad for Sophie featured at the end of the book is available to listen to. If you want to hear it performed by the author, Filipe Melo plays Balada parra Sophie himself, wherever music can be found, and in a video that you may see below these very words.