Novels with Illustrations

 The Strange Library by Haruki Murakami

Images found: https://www.theguardian.com/books/gallery/2014/sep/18/haruki-murakami-illustrated-the-strange-library-exclusive-preview

 

 

 I was really intrigued by the illustrations in Murakami's The Strange Library; the appearance of them feels inconsistent (the visual language/style changes from page to page), but that seems to fit with the content of the text quite well. It also feels like that if these images were taken out of context, they wouldn't have the same effect. Usually in illustrated novels, the images show part of the narrative. However these illustrations feel like they only show a small snippet of the content - which seems unusual as they take up a large amount of space on the pages.

 Although with my own work, I expect to produce illustrations that are more clearly narrative driven, I do like the idea of simply illustrating objects or small snippets of something from a scene. This could simply be a magical object - which would give the reader more of an insight into the true details of the world so that they can imagine other things more clearly.