This was a reread, as I’ve been doing a lot this week (going through bookshelves in your childhood home will do that to you). I enjoyed it and will keep it for the collection. I’ve read several of Guy Delisle’s travelogues and always like his point of view on things and the way he portrays his travels. I may not always agree with his conclusions or philosophy, but his clean linework and the way he interacts with the world make these volumes satisfying and thought provoking. I especially liked the chapters in this book where he condenses vacations he takes into many small speechless panels per page, which provide an impressionistic sense of the trip while getting across how compressed and overwhelming the amount of things you do in a short amount of time can be. He captures so much throughout with a deceptively simple style that adds to the impact of the work.
Delisle’s wife Nadege works for the French arm of Doctors Without Borders and he comes with her on assignment to various countries (previous volumes have covered their time in Pyongyang, Shenzhen, and Jerusalem). In this book, they spend a year in Burma, which I found especially interesting as it is very unlikely I will ever get the chance to go there. I think what I like about his books is that since he spends a year there, he captures a lot of quotidian life and it feels less touristic. He also spends a lot of time with the expat and NGO communities but is somewhat outside their sphere since he’s a cartoonist and animator, so he has an outside point of view of the countries he’s visiting and the Westerners who are working there. I can always do with more historical context, especially with the glancing references to French colonialism not having a lot of depth, and I think he is himself at a remove to the country that causes him to stay pretty surface level here. But overall I think this is a fun read and one that provides good insight into one man’s experience in Burma at a specific moment in time.