By Taylor Nelms and Eva Yonas

Gipi’s Italian masterpiece Notes for a War Story is a story of three boys who remake themselves into what they think are men. Giuliano, Christian, and Stefano (or Il Killerino—“Little Killer”) begin the novella wandering the war-torn countryside of their anonymous nation and are quickly conscripted as foot soldiers for a militia that, under the guise of patriotism, is waging a violent campaign of warfare and organized crime. The focus, however, is firmly on the boys as they test their new-found masculine identities. Thus, Notes for a War Story is also an exploration of the ambiguities of manhood, violence, and power amongst the complexities and brutality of war, failing institutions of governance, and social norms gone bankrupt.

Like Gipi’s previous First Second release Garage Band, Notes for a War Story’s strength is Gipi’s deft touch in shaping the personalities and subtleties of his characters. Despite – or because of – its profound emphasis on characterization, Notes for a War Story is a tightly wound thriller. When they are introduced to a charismatic militia leader named Felix, Giuliano, Christian, and Stefano are presented with new opportunities to earn money and power. Little Killer’s relationship with Felix grows steadily stronger, and soon the trio is caught up in a criminal underworld and, in turn, an intra-national conflict. As these brothers-in-arms negotiate shifting alliances and the ever-present potential for violence, Giuliano finds himself on the outside of the group looking in, his isolation elegantly symbolized by his dissonant and emotive visions of Stefano and Christian without heads.

In Notes for a War Story, Gipi has rendered a vast, boundless conflict in terms of its effects on the individual. The war is a nameless one in a nameless country, but interestingly, each of the smaller villages outside “the city” has a name. As Giuliano explains, “When they bombed a village it felt like they had really hurt somebody. Not a village, not a town, but an individual person.” The nonspecific settings provide the backdrop to a familiar story of youth caught up in deadly political games and the vainglories of war, but Notes for a War Story is also wrenchingly personal. Gipi finds a way to capture the private tragedy of violence in the quotidian stories of these young men: escaping a sniper’s bullet, watching the bombing of an abandoned house, owning a gun.

Thus, Notes for a War Story has an admittedly narrow narrative focus: Gipi uses the common technique of depicting broad-scale conflict through the personal experiences of individuals, illustrating the global with the local. What makes the book truly insightful, however, is Gipi’s ability to do the reverse – that is, to depict the struggles and conflicts of state-level institutions (national governments, militias, organized crime) via the struggles and conflicts of three boys. In fact, Notes for a War Story can easily be read as an allegory of failed statehood. The boys are nascent countries with newly defined boundaries and emergent national identities. Their internal conflicts – with themselves and each other – are made external: it is no coincidence that much of the early action takes place in San Giuliano. Indeed, early in the text Gipi pictorially equates the individual (in the form of the name “Giuliano”) with the polity (a darkened cityscape).

In a culture that privileges violent bravado as a way to establish one’s identity – whether personal or national – the recurring metaphor of headless people is jarringly appropriate, emphasizing both the anger of these young men and their partial selfhood. Without control over the course of their impulsive, inconstant lives, they search for power, finding it in masculine posturing and swaggering braggadocio. Like their war or their country, these lost boys are anonymous, but Giuliano – so much like his namesake – is different. From the upper-middle class and with a family to return to, he has ways to define himself other than with a gun.

The book’s thematic richness is gracefully realized by Gipi’s artistic subtlety. Gipi shows a careful, even cinematic, attention to mise en scène, his environments are thickly and beautifully rendered, and his consideration of sound and silence is especially thoughtful. He depicts background noises Ben Katchor-style, busses brooam-brooaming and fingernails sfrut-sfruting. After the trio witnesses the explosion of a house, Stefano stands up with parallel marks extending from each ear: “Fiiiiiiiiii.” Even scenes without sound, like an illustration of smoke rising from smokestacks, seem to possess a tonal quality. The tense silences that stretch out between strangers/potential enemies or across a deserted road are empty spaces on the verge of kinetic eruption, ready to detonate. As Felix aptly declares, “Atmosphere is important.”

Notes for a War Story is not, as the title may suggest, observational in the formal sense of the word. Rather, by conflating struggling statehood with emergent masculinity, Gipi presents a keen interpretation of the forces of war on personality and individual power. This bookis more than a collection of images of a broken country: mercenaries, bombed-out buildings, snipers lurking in windows. Instead, Gipi offers a fresh and compassionately accurate account of a nation hemorrhaging – one that is captivating and insightful and awfully, horribly touching.