Letter to Survivors

by Gebe, Edward Gauvin (Translator)

Overview

A haunting and darkly funny post-apocalyptic graphic novel that follows an unusual postal worker on his very bizarre mail route.


Amid the blasted rubble of a once-perfect suburb, a hazmat-suited postman delivers the mail, aloud.

He shouts his letters down a vent to the bunker-bound family below.

They describe the family's prosperous past life, and then get stranger and stranger...

Drawn by the famed cartoonish and Charlie Hebdo contributor Gébé, and never before available in English, Letter to Survivors is a blackhearted delight, a scathing, impassioned send-up of consumerist excess and nuclear peril: funnier—and scarier—than ever.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781681372402
Publisher:	New York Review Books
Publication date:	02/19/2019
Pages:	128
Product dimensions:	5.50(w) x 7.40(h) x 0.60(d)

About the Author

Gébé (Georges Blondeaux; 1929–2004) was a fixture of the French press for almost fifty years. He was best known as a cartoonist, but he was also an author, lyricist, screenwriter, and dramatist; a maker of short films and photo-novels; and a beloved editor and nurturer of new talent. From 1970 to 1985, he was the editor-in-chief of Charlie Hebdo. He returned when the weekly was reborn in 1992 and served as the editorial director until his death.


Edward Gauvin has translated more than three hundred graphic novels, including Blutch’s Peplum (NYR Comics). His work has won the John Dryden Translation prize and the Science Fiction & Fantasy Translation Award and has been nominated for the French-American Foundation and Oxford Weidenfeld translation prizes. He is a contributing editor for comics at Words Without Borders and has written on the Francophone fantastic at Weird Fiction Review. Other publications have appeared in The New York Times, Harper’s, Tin House, World Literature Today, and Subtropics.

Editorial Reviews

★ 12/17/2018

Built on a foundation of whimsical gallows humor, this book bursts at the seams with lessons as relevant to the current state of the world as when it was first published in France over 35 years ago. Clothed in a hazmat suit and mounted on a bicycle, a mailman delivers mail to a family living in their underground bomb shelter in the wake of nuclear apocalypse. With all signs of suburban life destroyed, the mailman cheerfully reads a series of anonymous letters through the shelter’s air vent, each one delivering a poignant (often macabre) story of the fallacies of the life they once knew: the social isolation of bipartisan thinking, the importance of work rather than passion, and the harmful desire to please everyone. Contrasting the thought-provoking stories, Gébé’s simple artwork is as playful as a children’s book. Through black-and-white cartoon linework, the characters of the letters and the family they are being read to are brought to life in a manner as satirical and pointed as the lessons they are depicting. This introspective and sardonic book makes it painfully clear how far society has failed to come in the decades since its debut. Agent: Nicolas Grivel, Nicolas Grivel Agency (France). (Feb.)

Publishers Weekly

"Originally published in France in 1981, the late Gébé’s post-apocalyptic warning makes its English-language debut thanks to award-winning, superbly prodigious (300-plus translated graphic titles!) Gauvin. His astute, context-rich introduction to the multifaceted, Charlie Hebdo-famed Georges Blondeaux (“Gébé” is the French pronunciation of his initials), underscores—ironically, tragically, yet somehow comically—the timeless efficacy of this 'slim, disillusioned volume' about the perils of blind capitalism and imminent self-destruction." —Booklist, starred review


"Built on a foundation of whimsical gallows humor, this book bursts at the seams with lessons as relevant to the current state of the world as when it was first published in France over 35 years ago... Through black-and-white cartoon linework, the characters of the letters and the family they are being read to are brought to life in a manner as satirical and pointed as the lessons they are depicting.” —Publishers Weekly, starred review

From the Publisher

02/01/2019

A man wearing a hazmat suit rides his bicycle through an irradiated wasteland. He stops at an air vent jutting up through the ground, which leads to a bunker down below, and starts reading a letter to the family within. This first letter describes the prosperous, idyllic life the family lived before an unknown cataclysm led to their current predicament. On subsequent visits, the letters the mailman reads become increasingly stranger, detailing the lives of kings, pre-World War I pastoral life, and a little girl's encounter with an elderly guitar player. Who is writing these letters? Who is this mailman? Is he trying to teach these people something, or is his goal to torment them? VERDICT Originally published in French in 1981 and available now for the first time in English, this odd blend of sf and satire of consumer culture by former Charlie Hebdo editor-in-chief Gébé raises more questions than it answers, but who needs answers when the cartooning is this elegant and the questions are this fascinating?

Library Journal