As crass as they come.
This Middle Eastern stew of a first novel suffers from an identity crisis. Does it want to be a blood-and-guts tale about factional strife and kidnapping in Lebanon, or a more cerebral examination of arms deals and statecraft in the Persian Gulf?
The Lebanon part is straightforward. In 1973, a Maronite militia overlord is gunned down, along with his family and birthday party guests, by a revenge-seeking rival. Eighteen years later, the dead man’s brother, at the Beirut airport, kidnaps a man he wrongly believes to have been implicated in the massacre. Though the ransom demand is made early on, the swap happens only at novel’s end: goodbye, suspense. The kidnapee, Gaspar Bruyn, is the protégé of Bobo (Bertrand de Bossier), the French aristocrat who dominates the story. Bobo, France’s top spy in Lebanon masterminded the massacre to protect his relationship with the PLO; soon after, he became head of France’s intelligence outfit. He’s some guy, this Bobo. Among his achievements: he allowed the Ayatollah to return to Teheran, helped arrange the takeover of the US embassy, and “maneuvered” Saddam Hussein into attacking Iran. (Top that, George Smiley.) All this was done for the glory of France, though not for that dirty Red, Mitterand, or his Jewish advisers. When Mitterand fired him, Bobo became an arms dealer, supplying his top client Saddam (legally) and Saddam’s Iranian adversary (illegally). Playing both sides of the fence eventually caught up with him when, in 1988, he was “executed” by his mistress, Deadeye, on behalf of French intelligence. Scholder moves back and forth between the 1991 kidnapping and earlier time-frames and, inter alia, expatiates on France’s relations with the Arabs, the origins of Iran/Contra, and the Maronites’ ties to Israel’s Sharon; all this makes for a bumpy ride, worsened by clunky prose (“blood was the dominant substance on the lawn, red the prevailing color”).
As crass as they come.Pub Date: May 1, 2003
ISBN: 1-57962-085-X
Page Count: 232
Publisher: Permanent Press
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2003
Gorgeous and troubling.
Cartoonist Kuper (Kafkaesque, 2018, etc.) delivers a graphic-novel adaptation of Joseph Conrad’s literary classic exploring the horror at the center of colonial exploitation.
As a group of sailors floats on the River Thames in 1899, a particularly adventurous member notes that England was once “one of the dark places of the earth,” referring to the land before the arrival of the Romans. This well-connected vagabond then regales his friends with his boyhood obsession with the blank places on maps, which eventually led him to captain a steamboat up a great African river under the employ of a corporate empire dedicated to ripping the riches from foreign land. Marlow’s trip to what was known as the Dark Continent exposes him to the frustrations of bureaucracy, the inhumanity employed by Europeans on the local population, and the insanity plaguing those committed to turning a profit. In his introduction, Kuper outlines his approach to the original book, which featured extensive use of the n-word and worked from a general worldview that European males are the forgers of civilization (even if they suffered a “soul [that] had gone mad” for their efforts), explaining that “by choosing a different point of view to illustrate, otherwise faceless and undefined characters were brought to the fore without altering Conrad’s text.” There is a moment when a scene of indiscriminate shelling reveals the Africans fleeing, and there are some places where the positioning of the Africans within the panel gives them more prominence, but without new text added to fully frame the local people, it’s hard to feel that they have reached equal footing. Still, Kuper’s work admirably deletes the most offensive of Conrad’s language while presenting graphically the struggle of the native population in the face of foreign exploitation. Kuper is a master cartoonist, and his pages and panels are a feast for the eyes.
Gorgeous and troubling.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-0-393-63564-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Norton
Review Posted Online: Aug. 18, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 2019
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.
Design veteran Chwast delivers another streamlined, graphic adaptation of classic literature, this time Mark Twain’s caustic, inventive satire of feudal England.
Chwast (Tall City, Wide Country, 2013, etc.) has made hay anachronistically adapting classic texts, whether adding motorcycles to The Canterbury Tales (2011) or rocket ships to The Odyssey (2012), so Twain’s tale of a modern-day (well, 19th-century) engineer dominating medieval times via technology—besting Merlin with blasting powder—is a fastball down the center. (The source material already had knights riding bicycles!) In Chwast’s rendering, bespectacled hero Hank Morgan looks irresistible, plated in armor everywhere except from his bow tie to the top of his bowler hat, sword cocked behind head and pipe clenched in square jaw. Inexplicably sent to sixth-century England by a crowbar to the head, Morgan quickly ascends nothing less than the court of Camelot, initially by drawing on an uncanny knowledge of historical eclipses to present himself as a powerful magician. Knowing the exact date of a celestial event from more than a millennium ago is a stretch, but the charm of Chwast’s minimalistic adaption is that there are soon much better things to dwell on, such as the going views on the church, politics and society, expressed as a chart of literal back-stabbing and including a note that while the upper class may murder without consequence, it’s kill and be killed for commoners and slaves. Morgan uses his new station as “The Boss” to better the primitive populous via telegraph lines, newspapers and steamboats, but it’s the deplorably savage civility of the status quo that he can’t overcome, even with land mines, Gatling guns and an electric fence. The subject of class manipulation—and the power of passion over reason—is achingly relevant, and Chwast’s simple, expressive illustrations resonate with a childlike earnestness, while his brief, pointed annotations add a sly acerbity. His playful mixing of perspectives within single panels gives the work an aesthetic somewhere between medieval tapestry and Colorforms.
Chwast and Twain are a match made in heaven.Pub Date: Feb. 18, 2014
ISBN: 978-1-60819-961-7
Page Count: 144
Publisher: Bloomsbury
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2013
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 15, 2013
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