Daytripper by Gabriel Bá

Abstract

reviews The title of Engel des Vergessens (Angels of forgetting) refers to pictures of two guardian angels that the Catholic mother of the childnarrator had hung up over her bed for divine protection. The narrator’s visits to concentration camps and former Nazi prisons reinforce her insight into experiences that traumatized her people. The tragic stories of neighbors and relatives are embedded into the seasonal flow of village life. Haderlap chooses the German language to create a protective distance from her material, a “Schutzschild” (protective shield) and a “Denksprache” (a language of thinking). She is often brutal when dealing with Nazi persecution, which she contrasts with lyrical passages describing dreams, fantasy, and nature, having a mystical quality. She notes that the pace of the novel reproduces the rhythm of remembered walks with her father. The family history, interwoven with the destiny of an ethnic group exposed to war, fanaticism, brutality , and discrimination, reverberates strongly in our world. It mirrors on a small scale our global problems. Maria Luise Caputo-Mayr Temple University Alexis Jenni. L’Art français de la guerre. Paris. Gallimard. 2011. isbn 9782070134588 Alexis Jenni won the 2011 Prix Goncourt for the epic narrative L’Art fran- çais de la guerre (The French art of war), his first novel. Some sections are told in the first person by an unnamed narrator, a young man who looks at the news on television, tries to avoid work, and whose life has nothing to do with the military. In other sections, the narrator relates the life of Victorien Salagnon, an artist from whom he takes lessons. As an adolescent, Salagnon fought with the maquis during World War II, where he met Eurydice, a nurse who arrives with North African troops during the liberation of France. He married her years later, after fighting in Indochina and serving as a parachutist during the Algerian war of independence. The novel is partly an adventure story, written as an explanation of French wars for a younger generation that lacks respect for soldiers. The fighting in both Indochina and Algeria is described graphically and with attention to the psychological tensions of the soldiers, who justify torture to gain information, but whose bravery is real. Salagnon retains a measure of humanity during the horrors of war by continuing to draw pictures of his comrades and of the landscape, even on scraps of paper from ammunition boxes. Years later, in France, Salagnon cannot reject a man whose racist political views he disapproves of because that man had carried him, risking his own life, when he was wounded by the Viet Minh. The novel is also an analysis of how France’s colonial history has shaped contemporary social and political movements, the use of armed columns of police in the suburbs , the country’s obsession with race, and its refusal to accept the Muslim population as French. The division between “us” and “them” continues in the contemporary debates about who has a right to a French identity card. When the narrator asks Salagnon if he ever tortured his opponents, he replies that the army did worse: “We created a world where, according to the shape of a face or a way of pronouncing a name, one was considered a subject or a citizen.” If there is any way of truly being “French,” the narrator decides, it is in the ability to speak the language: “the word is the true blood of the French nation. The language is our blood.” Moral issues, however, are never clear-cut. The Viet Minh and the Algerian Arabs, like the French, resort to torture. Salagnon takes Eurydice away from a violent hell as the French withdraw from Algiers. In an allusion to a famous comment by Albert Camus, her father says, “I prefer the life of my daughter to justice.” Adele King Paris Fábio Moon & Gabriel Bá. Daytripper . New York. Vertigo. 2011. isbn 9781401229696 Daytripper is the rarest of graphic novels—a work meeting all the expectations of great literature that somehow emerged from the grinding gears of the American mainstream comics industry. Written and drawn 68 | World Literature Today Imagine Africa Pirogue Collective Island Position The search for humanity through imagination...