"Then it is dark; a night where kings in golden suits ride elephants over the mountains." - John Cheever

Friday, September 11, 2009

Nothing to be frightened of

Anyone read this? I'm just about to - on my desk courtesy Amazon today.

To balance things out I'm also reading Tintin: The Complete Companion in tandem with reading Tintin stories to Jenny at bedtime. To pick up a conversation from a while ago, I don't think Herge was fascistic at all - just a product of his times.

5 comments:

Col said...

Nope, not yet.

Re: Tintin - the fascist thing is an exaggeration, but he was definitely anti-bolshevik, and didn't have very enlightened views of africans, chinese folk etc. - although probably normal for a 1950s Belgian. His drawings were really fantastic though. Although Asterix was funnier.

John said...

One thing I hadn't realised was that Tintin and the Shooting Star and the Red Rackham duology were written during German occupation and there's stuff in TATSS that reflects this - the scientists that set off to find the crashed meteorite are all of Axis / neutral nationalities; they're in competition with an American research ship funded by (err) very Jewish looking financiers...

John said...

BTW the Julian Barnes book is FUCKING AMAZING.

Tom said...

I remember visiting the cartoon museum in Brussels (actually while on John's stag do, in 2001) which has some great Tintin stuff. I bought "Tintin in the Congo" there, which you can't buy in the UK, or at least not easily. I guess you'd call it embarassingly rather than wickedly racist, and it's the cartoons (principally of gollywog Africans) rather than the text which are most problematic.

Tom said...

Btw, I had a look at my copy of Tintin and Shooting Star this morning, and Good God you're right - the chief villain looks like something straight out of a Nazi education film!