This book is a mental battle and one wonders how Christophe could have survived with his health and sanity intact! I often wondered how his legs didn’t atrophy or his body didn’t just sort of shut down after so much time eating only thin vegetable soup and tea, literally, for months on end. Then they would shove him back into his cell, handcuff him to a radiator, and let the days turn into weeks into months. Occasionally the captors would dress Christophe up and place him in a decent-looking location for a picture to show that he was still alive and being treated kindly.

And, whenever he considered release, he wondered how much his life was worth, determining that he wasn’t worth a very large sum, especially if his NGO was to be forced to foot the bill! The greatest struggle he faces is not knowing who among his friends and contacts back home was still fighting for his release. His experience is terrifying in its solitude and simplicity. He thinks and contemplates and dreams and worries. It’s all he is able to do really, not knowing the language of his captors or being able to communicate with the outside world in any way.

This book recounts his story as he told it to me.”įrom this point on, we journey with Christophe as he finds himself suddenly kidnapped from his apartment after only 3 months in the field and taken across the border into Chechnya where, for the next several months, he would be chained in various rooms and closets and be all but ignored by his captors, save for the daily meals and bathroom breaks. To quote Delisle’s page 1: “The events reported here occurred in 1997, when Christophe Andre was working for a humanitarian NGO in the Caucasus.

This graphic novel is a true story as told by a hostage victim in Chechnya. I simply didn’t know what it was I was renting! I recently finished reading Jerusalem because I had loved Shenzhen so much, so seeing this in my library’s catalogue, it was a no-brainer for me. When I requested this book from my local library, I had no idea how massive a volume it was-432 pages of hand-drawn graphics by Guy Delisle, my favorite French, travelogue-focused graphic-novelist (of this century).

Hostage by Guy Delisle