04/26/2021
Delisle (Hostage) opens this perceptive memoir observing himself at age 16, working summers at a Quebec City paper mill. Along with a paycheck, he receives a crash course in the class structures and social dynamics within the factory’s all-male workplace. He notes that the company’s white-collar employees (such as his engineer dad) enjoy air-conditioned comfort while he and the other laborers endure grueling shifts where “you feel like you’re in a sauna... you have to yell to be heard.” (Though he also explains how that shift cycle was negotiated by the union, as the long-termers prefer longer weekends.) The blue-collar resentment of privilege is sometimes aimed at Delisle; he repeatedly runs afoul of a coworker who “clearly has it out for summer hires.” He also regularly overhears instances of sexism, misogyny, and homophobia in his coworkers’ conversations, which contrasts with Delisle’s occasionally naive but sincere efforts at maintaining respectful relationships with others. His cartoony and simple yet textured drawings capture the characters with insight and gentle humor, as well as terrifying close calls with dangerous machinery. Delisle pinpoints the lesson learned those summers: “You can see the benefit of staying in school.” This should please Delisle’s loyal fans with its peek into his young adulthood. (June)
One of Publishers Weekly’s Most Anticipated Books of Spring 2021!
"One of the greatest modern cartoonists."—The Guardian
"This intimate book feels near mythic by the end: a real artist of paper emerging from the place where paper is made."—New York Times Best Graphic Novels of 2021
"[Delisle's] textured drawings capture the characters with insight and gentle humor, as well as terrifying close calls with dangerous machinery. [He] pinpoints the lesson learned those summers: 'You can see the benefit of staying in school.' This should please Delisle’s loyal fans with its peek into his young adulthood."—Publishers Weekly
"A carefully observed portrait of a time and place, as well as a deeply personal coming-of-age tale. Not to be missed."—Tom Batten, Library Journal, Starred Review
"Factory Summers is the key to Delisle’s nonfiction oeuvre: It shows his growing curiosity, in those formative years, both about how things function structurally and about people—and how he learned to listen to them. Its light touch makes a big impact."—Hillary Chute, New York Times
"The legendary Québécois illustrator revisits the summers he spent as a teenager working at a pulp-and-paper plant. The book details the quiet (and not-so-quiet) desperation of his older co-workers, while conjuring up the fugitive pleasures of those times now long past. Its portrait of his distant father, an executive at the plant, is at once sweet and bitter."—The Globe and Mail, Best Books of 2021
"Wry, illuminating... Delisle's endlessly droll observations result in a captivating, beguiling self-portrait of an artist-in-the-making as a hardworking teen."—Shelf Awareness
"In this black-and-white coming-of-age graphic memoir, Delisle... recalls with poignancy and humour the class tensions that permeated the summers he spent working, starting at age 16, on the floor of the Quebec City pulp mill where his father was manager for 30 years."—The Globe and Mail
"With smart use of a limited color palate, Factory Summers provides a personal history right alongside important lessons on work, climate, how we learn to navigate the world as a young adult, and, in the end, on the nature of family."—Booklist
"Factory Summers evokes all the formative memories associated with that first summer job—the eclectic coworkers, the long hours and the bittersweetness of clocking out for the last time."—Maisonneuve
"In his subtle, matter-of-fact way, Delisle has shown us that art and story can be an escape, for him and for us, not just as a temporary means of withdrawal from reality but as a means of survival."—The Comics Journal
"Delisle’s signature greyscale line drawings, eye for architectural and mechanical details as well as his expressive caricatures bring his memories to vivid life."—Winnipeg Free Press
★ 06/01/2021
Having previously offered keenly perceptive records of his experiences in China, Myanmar, Israel and Palestine, and North Korea, Delisle (The Handbook for Lazy Parents) turns his attention to the Quebec City Pulp and Paper Mill in this memoir of the three summers he spent working there, beginning when he was 16. Over a succession of 12-hour shifts spent maintaining dangerous machinery that emits a deafening roar and radiates smothering heat, Delisle observes the work's physical and mental toll on manual laborers, listens as his coworkers swap misogynistic banter, and becomes aware of how bitterly they resent the white-collar managers and engineers sitting in tidy offices far from the factory floor. That resentment is particularly eye-opening, as one of those white-collar managers happens to be Delisle's father. The two aren't close—during a rare visit, his father remains standing, eschewing conversation to deliver a rambling monologue. As Delisle navigates his new class consciousness and the toxic masculinity rampant at the mill, he begins to wonder how the environment might have shaped his father; more importantly, he's galvanized to chase his own artistic aspirations. VERDICT A carefully observed portrait of a time and place, as well as a deeply personal coming-of-age tale. Not to be missed.
2021-04-13
A rites-of-passage portrait of the graphic artist as a young man.
For more than 20 years, French Canadian cartoonist Delisle has chronicled his experiences as a vagabond traveler, with graphic narratives taking readers to Burma, Jerusalem, North Korea, and elsewhere. Here, he provides a kind of origin story of his formative years in Quebec City, when he was drawing for fun and unsure how to translate his talent into a career. Beginning at the age of 16, he spent his first of three summers working at the local paper mill, which produced newsprint for the likes of the New York Times. His father had spent his professional life as an engineer at the factory, but the author rarely saw him. Most of what’s important in the narrative goes unsaid, or barely said, with Delisle and his father failing to connect. In the drawings, which any Delisle fan will appreciate, the mill and its machinery exert a greater physical presence than any of the characters. The author remembers himself as a “loner,” more interested in going to the library than interacting with his fellow workers, some of whom are overly friendly, others brutish and ill-tempered. Those with whom he formed any sort of bond could be gone the next summer, and he chronicles how he visited his father, who no longer lived with the family, only once each summer. During the rest of the year, Delisle pursued an education as an animator, and though he was prepared to return for a fourth summer at the mill, an employment offer provided the pathway to his career in cartooning. He and his father never discussed his art, at least as portrayed in these pages, but when he died, the author discovered his father kept much of his work.
Bittersweet and elliptical, a narrative in which not much happens but everything changes.
