And he will keep count of every one: ‘Time is the only thing I’m sure of’. Deprived of conversation, company, exercise and any more than most minimal nutrition and personal care, Christophe cannot know that this slowed purgatory will not end after “two or three days at most”, as he reassures himself upon capture, but an eventual 111 days. The main text to read is his internal first-person narration, mostly in the present tense, fixing him in the tense present. Instead, he chooses to stay aloof but compliant towards his captors, who remain unexplained ciphers. Unable to understand his kidnappers’ language, the solitary prisoner barely speaks a word out loud. His solution was to edit and pace as many panels and pages as he needed for the reader to get inside Christophe’s head. Hostage was fifteen years in the making, while Delisle struggled to find the right tone and focus, abandoning an early draft which lurched into action-movie sensationalism. It becomes clear that chapters are not numbered one by one, but by the increasing number of days he has been held so far. Some rescue or escape will come, but as we are drawn through this book’s over four hundred pages, we share his anguished waiting and wondering when and how. The reader knows that Christophe survived: an image of him relating his tale to Delisle opens the book. Not so easy.” Indeed, his resolve to maintain sanity and hope will be tested almost to breaking point. No more making up scenarios… or jumping to conclusions. Initially he presumes they want him to unlock the office safe full of cash, but when they drive him off into the countryside, he imagines the worst. In 1997, Christophe was an administrator in the town of Nazran in Ingushetia, a Russian republic west of Chechnya, where he was seized from his bed by four men in the small hours of July 2nd. His subject and narrator is Christophe André, bearded, bespectacled, French, thirty, chubby, peaceable, on his first job in the humanitarian sector, working for the NGO Médecins Sans Frontières, like Delisle’s wife, through whom they met in 2001.

Hostage marks a departure, as Delisle takes a back seat to interpreting someone else’s extraordinary lived experiences. On a lighter domestic note, in his recent trilogy of vignettes he wittily exposes the lessons of becoming a father. Hostage: How Do You Survive When All Hope Is Lost?Ĭanadian Québécois cartoonist Guy Delisle’s acclaim since 2000 has been based on his autobiographical reportages, from an inquisitive outsider’s perspective, about his times spent in the politically sensitive locations of Shenzen, Pyongyang, Burma and Jerusalem.

Hostage by guy delisle