Hô Chí Minh was also a poet. From 1890-1969, Hô Chí Minh lived many lives in his seventy-nine years, a broad range of diverse roles and contributions that have attained a continued worldwide influence, from anti-imperialist Marxist-Leninst revolutionary, Vietnamese nationalist, political leader, philosophical thinker, newspaper founder, and columnist. His complete published writings available in English runs to fifteen volumes.
France
Given Amin Maalouf’s Lebanese origins, one might suppose that the Antioch in the title refers to the Levant, but it is in fact a small island, part of an isolated archipelago off France’s Atlantic Coast. (The French title, Nos frères inattendus, “Our unexpected brothers”, telegraphs the story better). Alexandre, a French-Canadian cartoonist, shares the island with Ève, a novelist who had one cult hit years before and who has retreated into isolation; they rarely if ever see each other.
Max Weber, an heir of the Enlightenment, wrote about “‘progress’, to which science belongs as a link and motive force”’ when considering the limitations of scientific rationalism. In detaching science from the strictures of reason, he had come full circle. This quote helps frame Alexander Statman’s ambitious essay, A Global Enlightenment: Western Progress and Chinese Science, a book about the reception of Chinese ideas on science or, rather, natural philosophy, in France during the late Enlightenment.
Some novels catapult readers into a different world than their own. Others, on the contrary, echo one’s life so closely that one cannot but devour them, if only to find out whether the similarities hold ’til the end. Such was my experience reading David Hoon Kim’s Paris Is a Party, Paris Is a Ghost.
Japanese art was a breath of fresh air to the citizens of 19th-century France, whose country was being overwhelmed with rapid modernization and industrialism. The focus on individual craftsmanship and quality stood in stark contrast with mass production, and the simple utilitarian designs were the antithesis of perceived contrivances in European schools of art. Japanese aesthetics quickly permeated all aspects of popular culture, from fashion to theatre to home decor, and assembling collections of Japanese imports became a common pastime for the wealthy elite. This enthusiastic reception and emulation of Japanese art was called japonisme.
“This book,” starts the introduction, “was written by a man who did not exist. Despite this obvious handicap, Alfred Raquez was extraordinarily prolific.” Raquez was in fact a man on the lam: his real name Joseph Gervais, a lawyer from Lille, who got into a spot of bother—fraud, it seems—and decamped to the Orient, as it was then called, to avoid arrest and prosecution.
Bandes dessinées are a francophone tradition; to call them “comic books” is do to them a disservice. The English term “graphic novel” isn’t quite right either, since a bande dessinée might, as is this one, be non-fiction; and while the artwork in contemporary English-language comics is not as dire as it once was, the emphasis is, as the term implies, as often as not on “graphics” rather than work in traditional media.