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Loading... Pyongyang: A Journey in North Koreaby Guy Delisle
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will love Sign up for LibraryThing to find out whether you'll like this book. Guy is a Canadian animator who often travels to Asia to work for various companies. This is one of the graphic novels he decided to write, chronicling the cultural and social aspects of living as a working visitor for weeks or months at a time in distinctly foreign country. Pyongyang was particularly interesting since it gives you glimpses of the elusive and secretive North Korea. I'm still not sold 100% on Guy's voice as a storyteller (or maybe it's him as a character in his own story?) but the content is by nature totally compelling. (  ) jentifer | Aug 15, 2009 |  http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/1245320... I very much enjoyed Delisle's book about Burma, but was disappointed in this. Some of the oddities he describes (cavernously empty restaurants with fictional menus and crap service, frenetically alcoholic international NGO workers) are entirely familiar to me from my time in the Balkans and could happen anywhere in the world where there is or has recently been a crisis. His description of the Koreans he actually meets is patronising rather than sympathetic; he somehow got the balance better in Burma. I would have liked to know a bit more about the economics of film animation that led to a Québecois cartoonist ending up in Pyongyang in the first place, but that remains a mystery. The situation in North Korea is clearly awful for its inhabitants and potentially dangerous for the rest of us, but I didn't get the insights I had hoped for from this book. (  )1  nwhyte | Jun 15, 2009 | Very perspicacious. Definitely makes you NOT want to go to N. Korea. Good writing and excellent drawing. First-rate graphic novel. leboyfriend09 | Jan 6, 2009 | Humor accompanies the tragic modern day observations of North Korea in this memoir. Western readers will get a rare first hand account of the day to day operations of the citizenry as experienced by a cartoonist on a work visa. The author uses the novel 1984 as an appropriate backdrop to his adventure abroad, and presents his memoir in the fashion he is most comfortable with: a graphic novel. The visual language of the drawings create a mood of loneliness and rigidity that tell a heavier story than the words that populate the panels. The subjective nature of the personal insights highlight the need for further factual readings about North Korean society, and high school librarians should plan accordingly. (  ) artlibby | Nov 15, 2008 | This humorous travelogue is about cartoonist Guy Delisle's experiences in the enigmatic country of North Korea, where the French animation company he works for has offices. Just what kind of country the author is entering becomes apparent on the first page, which shows his bag being checked by a security guard who has to ask him about its contents, such as what kind of book he has in his bag and what kind of music is in his CD player, as he nervously gives his explanation. The author not only describes the strict security measures in place, like the need for his translator and guide to accompany him everywhere, but also the various oddities of the country, many of which indicate that much of what the author sees in Pyongang is a facade. So much politically can be said about North Korea and Delisle has some opportunity to do just that, but most of the book is just about day-to-day occurrences that show how an average guy would experience a bizarre country like North Korea. As travelogues in graphic novel formats go, this book is a must-read. ( ) Lisatron | Nov 10, 2008 | 
 Delisle's evocative pencil drawings are suited to depicting a colourless, twilight world in which the state is all, with his rudimentary characters inhabiting vast and much more detailed architectural environments. Less well drawn are the inner lives of Pyongyang's citizens.  North Korea is a country suffering in more ways than the author makes note of and I’m sure any reader could surmise this from his account, but rather than mine the heart of this suffering, Delisle achieves the literary equivalent of hiding a paraplegic’s wheelchair. So while Pyongyang reads like cartoonist Craig Thompson’s breezy and introspective European travel diary, Carnet de Voyage, its content dictates that it be filed beside political artist Joe Sacco’s hard-hitting, from-the-trenches graphic novels about Sarajevo and Palestine – minus the first-hand accounts of violence, drama, and abject poverty. Because while a city can’t cry for help, maybe the odd cartoonist can act as a proxy.  This is a graphic novel so well crafted that the text begins to work as secondary illustration: propaganda begins to flow freely from each cell, like the canned music and broadcast exhortations that trail into the 15th floor hotel rooms; a small frame exchange between Delisle and his handlers perfectly sets up a full-page illustration of the dialogue’s own irony.
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