Hostage by Helge Dascher

in larger studies, and accordingly three of the six chapters scrutinize known authors of presumably different literary traditions for truly original findings that are an essential report to the comparatist academy. The novels Kirsch analyzes are not overly concerned with global perils but rather with clashes or escapes that alter personal reckonings, a choice that implies observing global novels as rooted in a way that is new to the readers but not to the authors. Testing present interpretative currents, the first chapter is triggered by the discontents assumed for world literature, namely making foreignness a literary commodity, literature politically virtuous and aesthetically challenging, and untranslatability. It is evident that Kirsch has not sought the political security clearance committed native critics and authors demand of interpretations like his, and he assuredly concludes (in the chapter on Atwood and Houellebecq) that this form of globalism “is based primarily on the experience of modern Western societies.” His assessment that we are entering “a future in which English is the dominant language” can be tempered by the abundance of world literature in other languages and their novel additions to the themes of climate change, immigration , morality, sexuality, and violence that he dissects. For other chapter pairings like Murakami and Bolaño or Adichie and Hamid, Kirsch construes as positive the cultural encumbrances that were perpetual reminders of their “foreignness” to untutored readers . The chapters devoted to individual authors (Pamuk and Ferrante) prove that cultural mobility and canonicity are social, that leaving home, as in Murakami and Ferrante, invalidates any need to seek the explanatory “authority” of your otherness, whether one is an Indian reading a Turk or an American reading a Nigerian, in English. With completeness in context and unsparingness in form, Kirsch articulates the tangible geopolitical spirit conveyed by these writers, which is ultimately what makes them global. His ecumenical and upbeat analysis successfully draws a “more hopeful picture of world literature than the one painted by critics and theorists,” since “it is impossible to say that all global novels have certain qualities in common.” Timely, direct, and full of good sense—characteristics that make it ideal for translation into other languages—The Global Novel brilliantly discards critical pieties to address numerous arguments for what the twentyfirst -century novel is becoming. Will H. Corral San Francisco Guy Delisle. Hostage. Trans. Helge Dascher. Montreal. Drawn & Quarterly. 2017. 432 pages. Christophe Andre was working as a Médecins Sans Frontières administrator in Ingushetia, just west of Chechnya, when World Literature in Review 88 WLT SEPTEMBER–OCTOBER 2017 he was kidnapped and held for 111 days. His story might well have been forgotten but for Guy Delisle’s extraordinary graphic talent. Delisle manages to get inside Andre’s mind and plumb his soul to provide the reader with a visceral experience of a most frightening and disorienting captivity. Having recorded interviews with Andre, Delisle has firsthand information with which to work. He uses it well but moves beyond mere facts to create a tour de force exploration of resilience. Using only shades of blue-gray, white, and black, Delisle’s panels follow Andre from the beginning to the end of his ordeal. The visuals are not emphatically fascinating in themselves or that varied— how much can you do with a man tied to a radiator in a small room, occasionally visited by a captor with a bowl of thin gruel? It is rather the territory within Andre’s mind that captures the reader and characterizes his movement from optimism and the certainty that his colleagues are plotting his rescue, to deep despair that he has been forgotten, to self-blame and self-incriminatory feelings of impotence. Andre doesn’t have a language in common with his captors, so his only recourse is to interpret their action or nonaction in conversation with himself. At a certain point, two of his captors, all of whom are made singular through the succinct genius of Delisle’s drawing, enter the room and offer him a glass of vodka, which he accepts, drinks with them, then thinks, “Is this fraternizing with the enemy?” Afterward , he berates himself for giving in to the very human craving for interaction. He holds onto...

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