Strangers in Paradiseis regularly interrupted for pages that tell nothing: illustrated poems, songs, silent plates, digressions with no apparent link to the plot.These interludes deeply divide readers - some consider them to be the best thing about the book, others systematically skip them. Both reactions are legitimate. But before deciding, it is worth understandingwhat they actually doin a story of ninety chapters.
This is the most confusing feature of this work, and paradoxically the one that is talked about the least - probably because it is almost impossible to defend in a single sentence, and most of the recommendations do not have space to say more.
This article describes these pages, offers an explanation of their function, honestly presents the argument of those who reject them, and gives a method for approaching them without spoiling your reading.
What exactly is it about?
These pages take many forms, and confusing them harms the discussion.
Des poèmes illustrés.A versified text accompanied by drawings, occupying one or more pages, without a direct narrative link with what precedes or follows.
Des chansons.Words laid out, sometimes attributed to a character, sometimes floating. They completely break the reading regime.
Des planches muettes.Sequences without dialogue where a character walks, looks, waits. These are not interludes in the strict sense, but they produce the same effect of suspension.
Des digressions.Passages that seem to belong to another book, the relevance of which we sometimes understand much later — and sometimes never.
What these pages do to the story
Elles ralentissent délibérément
In a story that alternates comedy and violence, these pauses prevent permanent acceleration. They impose a pause where the plot would like to move forward.
It's uncomfortable, and it's clearly intentional.
They say what the characters keep silent
The protagonists never name what they are to each other. The poems come close to this – without being attributed to anyone, therefore without committing anyone.
They mark the passage of time
A page of suspension between two chapters signals an ellipse more effectively than a mention of a date. The reader senses the interval instead of being informed of it.
They change the status of the book
A story that uses poems announces that it is not just a plot. It’s a demand, and it explains part of its public as well as its detractors.
L'hypothèse la plus convaincante
There is no consensus on any explanation, but one holds up better than others to examination of the pages themselves.
The story is based on a bond that its characters cannot name. They say it to each other through jokes, silences, gestures — never directly, because no available words would be suitable and they know it.
However, an author who refuses to make his characters say what they would not say deprives himself of an entire register. The interludes give it this register:they make it possible to state, outside the story and out of everyone's mouth, what the story cannot contain.
This would explain their position - often at moments when something has just happened without being commented on - and their tone, more lyrical than anything that appears in the dialogues.
Under this hypothesis, skipping them does not lose the plot but a layer of the book. This is not nothing, and it is not decisive either - which explains why both camps are right from their point of view.
The argument of those who reject them
It must be presented honestly, because it is solid and does not come from lazy reading.
The quality is uneven.This is the main criticism and it is well founded. Some of these texts are clumsy, others pointed, a few downright sentimental. An author who writes poetry without being a poet exposes himself, and the exposure is not always flattering.
They break a rhythm that was working.The dialogues of this work are its strong point. Interrupting a successful scene for a versified page can be experienced as a dead loss.
They border on complacency.On a self-published publication, no one is there to say that a passage doesn't work. Some interludes feel like they were kept because nothing stood in the way.
These three objections are admissible.Defending these pages does not imply claiming that they are all successful, only that they do something that the rest of the book cannot do.
The method that suits both camps.Read them on the first read, skip them on the second — or the other way around, depending on how you feel.
What doesn't work, however, is stopping at each one and wondering if you should read it. This hesitation costs more to the pleasure of reading than any clear-cut choice.
Why are they so confusing?
Nothing announces them
No summary, no section title, no distinctive layout warns us of a change of regime. We turn a page and we are elsewhere.
An unrelated register
The lyricism of these pages does not exist anywhere in the dialogues, which are familiar and funny. The contrast is more brutal than in a work with a uniformly serious tone.
Delayed relevance
Some refer to events that have not yet occurred. At first reading, they seem gratuitous; they only become clearer in retrospect.
A variable length
A page can be read effortlessly; six in a row frankly breaks the momentum of a current chapter. The frequency does not follow any regularity.
A process that is not isolated
It is worth situating this practice, because it has a history and the case is not unique.
Long-form comics have regularly welcomed heterogeneous materials: prose texts, essays, reader correspondence integrated into the story, fictional critical devices. Several major works in the medium combine different reading regimes in the same volume.
What distinguishes this case is that the interludes provide no information. They don't complete the world, they don't explain anything, they don't document anything.They are purely expressive, which is rarer and more risky.
This difference explains why they divide more than comparable processes. A prose text which enriches a universe is justified by its usefulness; a poem which has no other function than to exist can only be justified by its success.
What this says about publication format
A link exists between these pages and the method of publication, and it sheds light on their presence.
A monthly publication must fill a fixed number of pages, each month, regardless of the progress of the story. A chapter that ends too soon leaves a space. An author who publishes himself decides alone what he puts there.
This is not to say that these interludes are filler—several are clearly composed for the space they occupy. But the format made their existencepossible, where a pagination negotiated with a publisher would probably have excluded them.
It is one more illustration of the same mechanism: independence allows what no structure would validate, for the best as for the rest. The most singular pages of this work and its most questionable passages come from the same freedom.
What their presence costs the book
There is a price to these pages, and it is not limited to reading time. It is worth asking, because it explains part of the confidential reputation of this work.
A book that uses poems is poorly organized. A bookseller does not know whether it is a dramatic comic strip, a literary graphic novel or an unclassifiable object — and the unclassifiable is difficult to recommend. These pages therefore directly contribute to the low visibility of the whole.
They also complicate recommendation between readers. Advising this work requires warning, which always weakens advice: “it's very good, but there are passages which divide” has never convinced anyone to open a book.
Finally, they provide a convenient argument for anyone who wants to dismiss the work without having read it. It is easier to quote a clumsy poem than to discuss ninety chapters of successful dialogue.
This cost is real, and the author has clearly accepted it.That in itself is information about what he was looking for: not the widest possible audience, but a book that contained everything he wanted to put in it.
How to approach them in practice
Three pieces of advice, depending on the type of reader you are.
If you're reading for the plot, skip them without guilt. You won't lose any narrative elements, and the experience will remain consistent. The book never makes them necessary for understanding.
If you read for the characters, read them at least once. Several obliquely illuminate things that the protagonists will never say, and this illumination does not exist anywhere else in the book.
If you reread, read them first. It is on rereading that they work best: we then know what they echo, and many take on a meaning that they did not have the first time.
What this changes for a buyer
A practical consequence, specific to these pages and rarely reported.
These interludes often rely on unusual layouts — text integrated into the drawing, full-page compositions, white spaces. They therefore tolerate mediocre reproductions and bindings that do not open flat particularly poorly.
On a double page composed as a whole, a rigid spine which swallows the fold simply destroys the effect. This is the only place in the book where the quality of the binding directly affects the content.
Concretely, this adds a criterion to the usual checks:ask if the volume opens flat. It's a question you never think to ask, and one that matters more here than in most comics.
What to note
One field is enough, and it is unusual.
Your location on these pages.Write down, after your first read, whether you read them or skipped them — and what you thought about them. This seems anecdotal, and it is the information that will decide your rereading years later.
Let us add, for the copies, the flat opening of the binding, for the reason explained above. This is a criterion which does not appear in any standard status grid and which, on this specific work, determines whether a part of the book works or not.
These two notes answer a question that few inventories ask: does my copy allow me to access everything in the book, and have I actually tried to access it?
Frequently asked questions
On a narrative level, yes, entirely: no plot element appears there and the story remains perfectly coherent without them. What we lose is of another order — an expressive layer that obliquely says what the characters never articulate.
No, and to pretend so would be dishonest. The quality is uneven: some texts are clumsy, others heavy, a few frankly sentimental. An author who writes poetry without being a poet exposes himself, and on a self-published publication no one is there to point out that a passage does not work.
The most solid hypothesis is that they give the author a register of which the story deprives him. His characters cannot name what binds them; the interludes make it possible to state, outside the story and without being attributed to anyone, what the dialogue cannot contain.
Because a negotiated pagination leaves little room for pages that do not advance the story, and because a collection director would undoubtedly have challenged the less successful ones. It is the same mechanism which produces here the most singular pages and the most questionable passages: the absence of external contradiction.
On these particular pages, yes. They are often based on full-page or double-page compositions, which a rigid spine swallowing the fold destroys purely and simply. Asking if the volume opens flat is a question you never think to ask and which matters more here than elsewhere.
A volume that does not open flat loses part of its contents
This is a criterion missing from the status grids, and here it decides whether entire pages work.