His texts are often structured around disidentification-with both locals and other foreigners. (He befriends a Catholic priest in Jerusalem, for instance, who lets him use a back room in a cathedral as a temporary office.)ĭelisle is also far from the typical Anglophone-American tourist. He is not a journalist, however, and, arguably, it is his status of being an anodyne househusband-the primary parent of two small children-that gives him access to some surprising venues. Following his wife, Nadège, an administrator for Doctors Without Borders, all over the world, Delisle chronicles living as an expat in authoritarian states or war-torn countries that are perpetually in crisis, like Burma and Israel-Palestine. Delisle’s travelogues have the odd effect of being persistently timely. The volume closes with two archetypal autobiographical scenes: when Delisle accepts his first job in animation, and when he cleans out the apartment of his deceased father-who, himself, had worked at the factory where Delisle worked seasonally.įrench Canadian cartoonist Delisle wears a number of hats-graphic novelist, travel writer, quasi-journalist, househusband-in a number of locales: Pyongyang, North Korea Shenzhen, China Rangoon (Yangon), Burma (known officially as Myanmar) and Jerusalem. The book opens with a nod to Balzac’s ladder-climber Rastignac (the opening page of the French edition bears the inscription “A nous deux!,” a line that is removed from the English version) and a recounting of Delisle’s coming-of-age as a graphic artist. His graphic memoir of that time, Factory Summers ( Chroniques de jeunesse), reads like a bildungsroman of the bumbling teenager playing at a factory job.

The son of a white-collar industrial artist, Delisle is decidedly a class interloper, one of the few employees to work at the mill seasonally. For three summers in the late 1980s, during his high school and early college years, Guy Delisle worked in a pulp and paper mill outside of Montreal, before he abandoned his studies for a career in animation.

Chroniques de Jérusalem by Guy Delisle