Bear

Description

A debut picture book for adults about a bear that elicits immediate, deep emotional recognition. Bear, Staffan Gnosspelius's debut book, is a gorgeous visual meditation on depression. In this deeply affecting, wordless picture book for adults, a bear is maddeningly afflicted with a cone that covers his head and that he is unable to take off. He furiously stomps and yells and tears at the cone, he implores the skies and fate for relief, he is drawn to dark and wild and scary places. The depths of his sadness feel like a defeat. It's a battle he wages until he's mentally and physically exhausted. Then, one day, Bear hears notes of music, the humming of a friendly hare. The hare hovers nearby, concerned, sometimes driven away by Bear's frustration and anger, more often staying close and gently offering support. The author began drawing a bear with a cone on his head as a way to make sense of how a person close to him was suffering from mental illness. The resulting book is both an emotional gut punch and a warm embrace, recognizable immediately to anyone who has ever suffered or loved someone who has suffered in similar dark places. In other words, all of us.

STAFFAN GNOSSPELIUS was born in Sweden and studied visual communications at Edinburgh College of Art and at Chelsea College of Art and Design in the U.K. Since 2002 he has lived in London where he is a printmaker, illustrator, and artist. Staffan is the author of the children's book, Julia and the Triple C, which will also debut in the Fall of 2022.

"An excellent example of silent narrative conveying feelings of entrapment and resistance, feelings that are not easily described or even understood but still necessary to witness, to resolve." Shaun Tan "What better way to convey the feeling of the wordless country of depression and the adjacent state where the beloveds of the sufferers suffer alongside than through spectral prints and drawings that manage to be both terrifying and delightful? With Bear, Staffan Gnosspelius has captured the abyss-tentacled, thorned, rife with traps, drained of color, light, and language-and the respite and grace offered by love. This is a deeply tender and wondrous book." -Maud Casey, author of The Art of Mystery: The Search for Questions and City of Incurable Women "This slim and sweet yet eerie wordless fable by Swedish artist and printmaker Gnosspelius begins with the funny-sad image of an enormous bear with its head stuck in a cone. A lanky rabbit tries to help, undaunted by the bear's anger and frustration, and the two animals become wary companions. Unable to speak, they connect through music, and in time the question arises of what will happen to their unlikely friendship if the bear ever gets out of his predicament. The lushly illustrated wilderness they explore appears sometimes as a realistic landscape of woods, fields, and gorges, and sometimes as a nightmare in which spikes protrude from the ground, giants lurk in the trees, and tentacles rise from the depths to snare passersby-a visual expression of the bear's confusion and fear. In one lovely moment, a swarm of menacing tentacles transforms into a sun-dappled grove. Gnosspelius's delicate black-and-white art, so sure with light and shadow, imbues the gloomiest encounters with natural beauty. As the bear and rabbit make their way toward a silent understanding, they pass through the darkness, and slowly pages of soft, bright watercolors occasionally appear and suggest dawning relief. As an allegory about depression, connection, and friendship, this work will strike a chord with receptive readers. Each page is a piece of art worth poring over." -Publishers Weekly