Burma Chronicles

From the author of Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea and Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China comes Burma Chronicles, an informative look at a country that uses concealment and isolation as social control. It is drawn with Guy Delisle’s minimal line, interspersed with wordless vignettes and moments of his distinctive slapstick humor.

Praise

“Drawn with charming simplicity and brio, the book mixes traditional travelogue with glimmers of the unexpected.”—The New Yorker

 

"What makes Burma Chronicles so charming is its balance of quotidian domestic life and international affairs. Delisle's growing knowledge of the country's culture plays off the constant development of his infant son, lending the whole work (and the world) refreshing perspective."—Kristin Butler, The Atlantic 

“[Delisle] puts everyone's triumphs, tragedies, and (especially) foibles on full display. It is journalism the way journalism should be: readable, educational and, hopefully, transformative."—Chicago Sun-Times

 

"The best travelogue you'll read this year is a funnybook. About a not particularly funny place."—NPR.org

 

"Delisle deals with serious subjects, but his cartoony workmanlike style is well-suited to his genial observations of the good-hearted people in this profoundly damaged nation."—The Oregonian

 

"The accumulation of detail about supermarkets, bookstores, and local festivals goes a long way toward humanizing a country that barely gets mentioned on the evening news unless something awful is happening there."—The Onion A.V. Club

 

"The reader has a real sense of strangeness—sometimes sinister, sometimes comical, sometimes downright baffling—of life under an oppressive and secretive regime."—The Gazette (Montreal)

 

"Delisle's style is simple but highly eloquent, and he tells more about the depth and breadth of the Burmese experience in the book's little nonfiction vignettes than he ever could in an artificially imposed narrative. Burma Chronicles is not merely a neat piece of cartooning but a valuable artifact of a repressive and highly destructive culture that curtails free speech with unparalleled tenacity. Like Joe Sacco's The Fixer and Safe Area Gorazde, Delisle uses cartooning to dig into a story that demands to be told."—Publishers Weekly

 

 

 

 

About the Author(s)

Guy Delisle

Guy Delisle spent a decade working in animation in Europe and Asia. In 2005–2006, he accompanied his wife, an administrator for Doctors Without Borders, on a fourteen-month posting in Burma. He is currently working on a graphic novel about a year spent in Jerusalem.