Critics' Opinion:
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Published Oct 2023
368 pages
Genre: Graphic Novels
Publication Information
A visionary story of three generations of artists whose search for meaning and connection transcends the limits of life
How do we relate to—and hold—our family's past? Is it through technology? Through spirit? Art, poetry, music? Or is it through the resonances we look for in ourselves?
In Artificial, we meet the Kurzweils, a family of creators who are preserving their history through unusual means. At the center is renowned inventor and futurist Ray Kurzweil, who has long been saving the documents of his deceased father, Fredric, an accomplished conductor and pianist from Vienna who fled the Nazis in 1938.
Once, Fred's life was saved by his art: an American benefactor, impressed by Fred's musical genius, sponsored his emigration to the United States. He escaped just one month before Kristallnacht.
Now, Fred has returned. Through AI and salvaged writing, Ray is building a chatbot that writes in Fred's voice, and he enlists his daughter, cartoonist Amy Kurzweil, to help him ensure the immortality of their family's fraught inheritance.
Amy's deepening understanding of her family's traumatic uprooting resonates with the creative life she fights to claim in the present, as Amy and her partner, Jacob, chase jobs, and each other, across the country. Kurzweil evokes an understanding of accomplishment that centers conversation and connection, knowing and being known by others.
With Kurzweil's signature humanity and humor, in boundary-pushing, gorgeous handmade drawings, Artificial guides us through nuanced questions about art, memory, and technology, demonstrating that love, a process of focused attention, is what grounds a meaningful life.
"Intimate reflections and powerful visual elements combine in an exemplary work of graphic nonfiction." —Kirkus Reviews (starred review)
"Kurzweil's highly recommended memoir is unlike any other. It will leave readers with much to contemplate." —Library Journal (starred review)
"Part meditation on immortality, part profile of the author's father—inventor and artificial intelligence pioneer Ray Kurzweil—this finely crafted graphic family memoir from New Yorker cartoonist Kurzweil takes an intimate approach to philosophy ... This melancholic yet loving investigation gets at how AI is as much about the past and what humanity has already created as it is about the future." —Publishers Weekly
"A thought-provoking examination of family and identity, artificial intelligence, and the nature of creativity ... Even those with little interest in AI will connect with the desire to feel known and loved, across time and distance and even across generations ... A wide-ranging and intellectual memoir, one that insists on the growth that comes through uncertainty." —Shelf Awareness
"Kurzweil's extraordinary graphic memoir is a story about memory, family, immortality, artificial intelligence, love and consciousness itself. Far-reaching and fascinating." —Roz Chast, New Yorker cartoonist
"Hilarious, heady, and full of feeling, Artificial tells the history of an exceptionally compelling family—a conductor grandfather, a futurist father, an artist daughter and granddaughter—through the lens of technology, art, and memory. Amy Kurzweil draws her way through big questions (What is genius? What is love?) with so much open-hearted wisdom that I wanted to follow her right off the page. It's a rare artist who can so eloquently move between the personal and the metaphysical: This book is beautiful, strange, and belongs on your bookshelf forever." —Kristen Radtke, author of Seek You: A Journey Through American Loneliness
"With her masterful counterbalancing of intricacy and simplicity, repetition and surprise, subtle detail and stark contrast, Kurzweil is at the peak of her powers as a cartoonist. Artificial is a poignant record of a daughter's clear-eyed devotion to her quixotic genius of a father, of her finding true love despite everything, and of the sources of her own quirky gift for conquering time and space with nothing more than paper, pencil and ink. I absolutely adored this book." —Michael Chabon, author of Moonglow
This information about Artificial was first featured
in "The BookBrowse Review" - BookBrowse's membership magazine, and in our weekly "Publishing This Week" newsletter. Publication information is for the USA, and (unless stated otherwise) represents the first print edition. The reviews are necessarily limited to those that were available to us ahead of publication. If you are the publisher or author and feel that they do not properly reflect the range of media opinion now available, send us a message with the mainstream reviews that you would like to see added.
Any "Author Information" displayed below reflects the author's biography at the time this particular book was published.
Amy Kurzweil is a New Yorker cartoonist and the author of Flying Couch: A Graphic Memoir. She was a 2021 Berlin Prize Fellow with the American Academy in Berlin, a 2019 Shearing Fellow with the Black Mountain Institute, and has received fellowships from MacDowell, Djerassi, and elsewhere. She has been nominated for a Reuben Award and an Ignatz Award for "Technofeelia," her four part series with The Believer Magazine. Her writing, comics, and cartoons have also been published in The Verge, The New York Times Book Review, Longreads, Literary Hub, WIRED and many other places. Kurzweil has taught widely for over a decade. See her website (amykurzweil.com) to take a class with her.
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