36. Pascal Brutal by Riad Sattouf

June is Riad Sattouf month here at Olman's Fifty.  Since stumbling upon L'Arabe du Futur, I have pillaged the library for his previous work.  Pascal Brutal come out in the early 2000's in the earlier phase of his work, though he had already established himself, where he was less polished and way more edgy.  It was published regularily in Fluide Glacial, which I need to learn more about, and then released in 3 albums (and later a fourth), which are what I read (thanks again to the awesome bande-desinnée collection at the Montreal library system).

These are fucking hilarious.  I don't think they could be translated into english, unfortunately, and it took me a lot of looking things up on the internet to understand some of the jargon.  Much of the cultural in-jokes about the French, the Bretons, the underclass and Arab/north african French I could only surmise or missed entirely.  Though reading Pascal Brutal itself is an education in these subjects and I felt that I better understood that part of the material as I advanced in the volumes.

The parts that do come through to any reader, and especially of my generation, are the anarchic energy and amplifying of extreme virility.  Pascal Brutal pokes at that hilarious intersection where the straightest, machoest toughest guy is so manly that he may as well be gay.  There are several scenarios where this indeed happens. His animal dominance of all other males and sexual irresistability to all females is also a big theme and super funny.  

The setting is also quite a funny take on the neoliberal direction France and the world was heading in the early 2000s.  France is now a depressed near third world country of concrete apartment blocks and discount supermarkets (the Toutattiprix "all at a cheap price" chain is a running joke).  We get glimpses of the rest of the world as well.  Belgium is a fascist gynocracy, Russia a savage post-nuclear wilderness and the Arab states a super progressive and united utopia.  It's very fun but also a painful reminder that sometimes the only way to not lose it altogether in the shit hole we have allowed our planet and society to become is via humour.

Pascal Brutal is in a similar tradition to Red Ketchup and the less well-known Terror Assaulter (O.M.W.O.T).  It's a counter-culture parody and examination of manliness and violence from the perspective of nerdy comics creators who love the genre but aren't of it.  I wish there were more!

The first three volumes are rougher in drawing and the stories more straightforward.  The fourth volume, which came quite a few years after the first three, has a more polished style, richer colours and takes the concept of Pascal Brutal to a more meta-level, with hilarious movie concepts and him leading the French soccer team in the world cup.  

"I'm going to make love to all of you!"

This one where he is training his dog and
gets set up on by some old enemies is my favourite

35. Watership Down by Richard Adams

My daughter is way into rabbits.  Obviously, Watership Down is the classic of the rabbit adventure genre and I had been wanting to read it to her for years but was wary due to my own memories of how harsh and potentially traumatizing either it or the movie had been.  These memories were hazy.  We finally bit the bullet and read it over most of the first half of the year. It's a fairly long book.

At first, it was a bit slow and took her a while to get into it.  There are lots of asides about rabbit behaviour and mythological rabbit stories, but as the gang of runaway rabbits make their journey, you start to get to know their characters.  Once they are settled into Watership Down and start to face the real threat, the neighbouring Efrafa warren and their control-freak leader Woundwort, we were fully invested.  The climactic ending was epic and moving.

I think it's fair to put Watership Down in the same classic fantasy genre epic as Lord of the Rings. It creates a rich alternate fantasy world that parallels our own and yet adds a level of excitement and heroism.  It builds up a conflict between good and evil, though interestingly the evil is less about industrialized world-destroying tyrants than an obsession with order and control of society.  The world destroyers are us humans and so powerful that it is basically the catalyst for the initial destruction of the home warren and then barely felt throughout the rest of the book.  As a particular fan of animal adventure narratives and the notion that our world to a creature of smaller scale can be as fantastic and escapist as any fantasy world, I actually would now lean towards Watership Down as a preferable read (though I haven't read LotR since I was a kid myself).

The one big bummer with Watership Down is how painfully and ignorantly sexist it is.  The adventuring party are all males, which while creating a good narrative need, took my daughter out of it at first and I've since read is also scientifically erroneous.  Warrens are actually more matriarchal in structure.  It's crazy how powerful and assumed our social stances are when compared to reality and especially discouraging when you see how entrenched they are in the fantasy and science fiction genre, which is supposed to be about moving beyond those stances.  You could simply swap the genders entirely in Watership Down and it would have been exactly the same and as good, except that nobody would have read it and those that did at the time would have probably scoffed at its unbelievability and lack of realism.  It would only get discovered decades later.

Anyhow, we got over it and ended up really enjoying it.  I strongly recommend it.  Needs to be rediscovered by today's nerds.

[VERY MINOR AND BROAD SPOILER ALERT CONCERNING HOW SCARY AND DARK WATERSHIP DOWN MAY OR MAY NOT BE]

I think now that I may have never actually read it myself and only saw the movie, which indeed has some pretty intense imagery and gore.  Because I had pumped up the harshness of the book so much, both me and my daughter were constantly in dread of some of our favourite characters getting offed throughout the whole reading.  I was pleasantly surprised to find that while it definitely has some real world death that comes to rabbits, the narrative as a whole is quite classic and heroic and in the end good mostly prevails.

We did watch the movie after, which is quite faithful and it has two sections that are definitely quite freaky.  The retelling of the gassing of the first warren has some imagery that while somewhat abstract is still effectively horrifying as the rabbits all bunch up in the tunnels. The final act is also just straight up really gory with some very red blood.  Not recommended for little ones but fine for 10 and up.  Her real issue with the movie that I thought was quite accurate was that it bunches the narrative up and everything happens too fast. It definitely should have been a trilogy.  We are going to check out the series next.

34. L'Arabe du futur by Riad Sattouf

I had already returned #1 to the library

I had vaguely heard about this bande-dessinée when I found books 5 and 6 (in almost new condition) in a free giveaway box just doors from our place.  I took them, started reading number 5 and then realized I really needed to read it in chronological order and so got the first 4 from the library (and they came via inter-library loan within a few days; gotta love the library).  I dived right in and basically didn't/couldn't stop reading until it was done.  This is the kind of book that makes it easy to not go to the internet (and makes it hard to turn off the light at bedtime).

It is the story of the author's childhood and youth, with a tail at the end summarizing his early success as a comics creator.  But it's really the tragic story of his father, a Syrian who did quite well in school that he was able to come to the Sorbonne, where he met Sattouf's mother.  He (and the family by extension) is torn between his main goal to build a palacial home on his hereditary land in Syria and the pressures of living there on him and mainly on his family.  Not only is Syria impoverished and a dictatorship, but where he moves his family too is way out in the country, which is even poorer and very traditional (trying not to be judgemental here, but from the mother's perspective also backward to the point of being scarily primitive).  It's fascinating to see how to our western perspective, the father seems strict and almost abusive in his attempts at raising his family in the Islamic tradition in which he was raised.  Yet from his family's perspective, he is going to hell because of his lack of practice and faith.

It's really hard for me to do justice to this book (or these books, as it is in 6 volumes).  It really is an epic tragedy but also chock full of humour, warmth and interesting observations on culture and politics and humans.  I was completely absorbed while reading it and moved with many emotions and thoughts.  There is an english translation so I would strongly recommend that you seek that out, via bookstore or library.

On a graphic note, Sattouf uses a slightly cartoony style and it deceives the reader into a lightness of reading that hides the depth underneath.  It is episodic and many of the narrative capsules are enjoyable moments in and of themselves.  The characters are made sympathetic with their round noses even if they often actually aren't and over time it makes the horror of what is actually going on really sink in (or sometimes slammed into you at certain particularly shocking moments).  It's incredibly effective storytelling.  

On a personal tangent, reading this book reminded me of a thing that went on right after I got out of college.  My girlfriend had met this dude from Morocco when she was travelling in Spain with her lesbian girlfriend a few year before we got together and he had become a kind of remote stalker.  He would phone her up from time to time and try to convince her that she was siding with the devil.  Her mother gave him her new phone number when we were living together (wtf) and I picked up when he phoned once.  I was aware of this situation and launched into a macho (hey I was in my early 20s) attack about how I was going to find him and kill him and then he did the same and we had a brief spazzy back and forth before we both calmed down and ended up having an interesting conversation for about a half-hour.  The guy was living in some small town in Morocco and believed that he was trying to save her.  It was actually kind of sad.  The poor guy was still obsessing over her and had some toxic mix of sexual/romantic attraction (she was quite lively and engaging with people to the point that there were boundary issues) mixed with fascination/revulsion of her being a lesbian.  I tried to argue with him on a philosophical level but he was more mollified that she was now with a man, though disappointed.  I can't remember how it ended but it wasn't negative and we never heard from him since, but who knows as we broke up a few years after that.

These fucking old school religions and their obsessions with controlling female sexuality end up fucking up the guys just as much (though of course it's the women who suffer).  The cultural differences go beyond just sex in L'Arabe du futur and it powerfully captures how this conflict can tear a family apart and by subtle extension also demonstrates how it continues to cause conflict in France.  Strong recommendation.  I am now on the hunt for Sattouf's other work.

33. The Places in Between by Rory Stewart

A friend recommended this book to me, sort of out of the blue and it looked up my alley (British dude walking) and I was lucky enough to find it right away at my local library.  Now that I have read it, I have mixed feelings about it.  First off, I have to acknowledge it is a very well-written book, very accessible and clear.  And the journey itself is insanely impressive and crazy, all the while its craziness is very much downplayed by the author in classic British understatement.  However, that understatement is also tamping down a lot of privilege going on behind the scenes here.  Stewart is basically a Scottish aristocrat with a possible military intelligence background and definitely a strong diplomatic background (which he has continued quite successfully into a significant political and academic career).  It's not that he doesn't acknowledge that his sufferings are his own choice and that he is consciously aware of the differences in his life context compared the people he meets on the road.  There is just a subtle attitude of slight superiority or something in this book that only once gets made explicit in a footnote where he tries to argue that the original British colonial exploiters in the Middle East were more engaged and connected to the locals than any of the "experts" coming in after 9/11.  Again here he is broadly right, but it's the attitude behind that made me go whoah.  Also the New York Times calling it a "a flat-out masterpiece" really doesn't help.

Stewart basically walks from Herat to Kabul, across extremely dangerous environments.  Until he gets close to Kabul, the danger is mostly environmental, but it is no joke. You do not get any real sense of the true discomfort he was experiencing.  He mentions quite a few times that his boots were soaked through but only once that actual temperate, which was -20!!!  He also is suffering from dysentery most of the time and eats the most minimal diet, with basically stale bread and water at points for several days at a time.  It's pretty fucking hardcore if you have ever done any actual hiking and read between the lines.

Also hardcore is his social/tourist courage.  He is basically walking through a country that has been engaged in 2 civil wars (to put it simply) first against the occupying Russians and then against the Taliban and now only slightly "pacified" by the coalition led by the Americans.  It's a really dangerous place.  Yet he just goes and knocks on people's doors and asks if he can spend the night.  As an individual on foot, most people are not threatened by him but more confused.  The Islamic tradition of hosting is also a factor, though much diminished with the extreme poverty (and destruction from war) that many of the villages he visits are experiencing.

It's a really interesting book, just to get a sense of how remote and removed these places are, not only from the foreign empires that are invading them, but even from their own cities and regions a few hundred miles away.  At the same time, Stewart peppers his narrative with lots of neat history (particularily the journey of Babur, Afghanistan's first Mughal emperor) so you get a sense of how connected it once was.  It is also a bit repetitive and not a lot goes on but him walking. I didn't mind this at all, but just noting it for those who want to argue that it is a masterpiece.  Anyhow, I'm glad I read it.