Sunday

A Sunday in 2017. Thibault Schrauwen, the author’s cousin, is having an uneventful day: he wakes up, drinks coffee, checks his email, is annoyed with his client Antoine, has a James Brown song stuck in his head, masturbates, takes a bath, tries to read a book and wonders when his girlfriend is coming home. And by that time it’s still only ten in the morning.

‘Sunday’ follows Thibault from morning till midnight. For 472 pages, we follow every single one of his banal, uninteresting, sometimes embarrassing and frequently irritating thoughts. From this seemingly dull and unlikely premise, Olivier Schrauwen manages to distil a brilliant graphic novel. While Thibault’s thoughts keep churning, we see memories, hypothetical events, a film, what the neighbours are up to, what little his friends are doing and the escapades of the local wildlife. It’s the way all these banalities are interwoven that makes this a true masterpiece. Schrauwen slows things down to the point of unbearable, and in doing so creates an intensely immersive experience, which, despite the triviality that permeates everything, becomes truly epic.