Enhanced descriptions from Syndetics:

A book without words, recounting a day in the life of an office worker, told completely in the symbols, icons, and logos of modern life.

Twenty years ago I made Book from the Sky , a book of illegible Chinese characters that no one could read. Now I have created Book from the Ground , a book that anyone can read.
--Xu Bing

Following his classic work Book from the Sky , the Chinese artist Xu Bing presents a new graphic novel--one composed entirely of symbols and icons that are universally understood. Xu Bing spent seven years gathering materials, experimenting, revising, and arranging thousands of pictograms to construct the narrative of Book from the Ground . The result is a readable story without words, an account of twenty-four hours in the life of "Mr. Black," a typical urban white-collar worker.

Our protagonist's day begins with wake-up calls from a nearby bird and his bedside alarm clock; it continues through tooth-brushing, coffee-making, TV-watching, and cat-feeding. He commutes to his job on the subway, works in his office, ponders various fast-food options for lunch, waits in line for the bathroom, daydreams, sends flowers, socializes after work, goes home, kills a mosquito, goes to bed, sleeps, and gets up the next morning to do it all over again. His day is recounted with meticulous and intimate detail, and reads like a postmodern, post-textual riff on James Joyce's account of Bloom's peregrinations in Ulysses . But Xu Bing's narrative, using an exclusively visual language, could be published anywhere, without translation or explication; anyone with experience in contemporary life--anyone who has internalized the icons and logos of modernity, from smiley faces to transit maps to menus--can understand it.

Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

Chinese artist Xu's latest work (after Book from the Sky) seems like a lot of gibberish if you just flip through it-long lines of symbols with no text anywhere to be seen. Focus in, though, and you'll discover that what Xu has done is present a single day in the life of an average man, depicted entirely in emoticons, street signs, corporate logos, and other easily recognizable symbols. It takes a moment to catch on, but once a reader falls into sync with Xu, it is immensely pleasurable to decipher the story, like cracking a code or understanding a foreign language for the first time. Xu's intent seems to be to highlight the importance of nonverbal communication in 21st-century life, and he succeeds wildly. Even the inner lives of his characters, their hopes and dreams, their secret desires, are brought to life through simple symbols in sly combination and the use of repetition. Verdict While this book might turn off readers looking to escape into a more conventional narrative, anyone interested in experimental fiction, modern art, or a little bit of challenge will be delighted.-Thomas L. Batten, Grafton, VA (c) Copyright 2014. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

CHOICE Review

A leading representative of the new wave of Chinese artists who emerged on the international stage after Tiananmen, Xu works in a variety of media. His signature piece is Book from the Sky (1987-91), a series of limited editions and exhibitions of texts printed from hand-carved blocks resembling Chinese characters but in fact concocted, lacking semantic content. No one could read Book from the Sky. Anyone can read Book from the Ground, a clever novella recounting an office worker's day. Entirely pictograms--ideographs, logos, emojis, symbols, signage icons--the book stands as an expansive, creative, sustained example of a language that has become popular online. This global language needs no translation, and its form, the artists' book, speaks for a persistent fondness for printed matter. Not surprisingly, and to its credit, MIT University Press (which is known for good design) is responsible for publication. MIT also published a companion explanatory volume--The Book about Xu Bing's Book from the Ground, ed. by Mathieu Borysevicz (2014)--but it seems premature. Though it provides interesting background on the artist and his process, and on other aspects of the larger project (which includes video, installations, and so on), the collection seems padded and it ignores related art such related work as lettrism and wordless graphic novels. Summing Up: Essential. All readers. --Michael Kasper, Amherst College