Benevolence and Dictation

So if the French are amazing at satire and the Canandians are fairly polite people, does that mean that Guy Delisle does polite satire? 

After reading Pyongyang, I'd have to say yes. The entire story is a trippy cheek-biting exploration of a culture so far removed from the western experience as to be nearly incomprehensible. 

While the story wasn't as intense a read as Black Hole, I still found it worth it. The Author's commune with the trapped Sea Turtles was an especially poignant image, especially when juxtaposed at how frenetic the rest of the story felt. At every turn, the author was being moved from place to place and with every move there were eyes watching. IN the dark of the lobby, there was a stillness that was absent in the rest of the book. 

The section that described the visit to the Friendship museum was clever as well, especially the cheek biting at the absurdity of genuflecting to a wax statue. It brought this to mind:

  

I know, it's Anderson Cooper, but there's just something about the giggles. He does it a lot and every time, it catches me too. 

With Pyongyang, I got caught out by the author's sense of the absurd, and I gotta tell you, it's probably only slightly better to be giggling like a madwoman in a library. 

Pfft. At this point, I should just surrender and accept that I'm incapable of not making a goof of myself in public.

Pyongyang is full of sarcasm. It took a while to get through, not that it was difficult or anything just a little boring. I mean we from Black Hole to Fun Home both are rather intense in their own way, to a simple story of a cartoonist in the overly suppress country of North Korea.I think the author used sarcasm as comic relief, because of how suppressed the country is and how suppressed he must of felt this was the only outlet he had.