Joe and Azat TP Jesse Lonergan NBM Comics Turkmenistan

Description

Joe is an American in the strange land of Turkmenistan who finds a good friend in Azat, a Turkmen dreamer whose optimism knows no bounds. With tales of doomed desert cab rides, nights of endless vodka shots, unlikely Turkmen business schemes, and secret girlfriends, Lonergan captures the bizareness of his Peace Corps experience in the former Soviet republic. Culling material from his days as a Peace Corps worker in Turkmenistan, Lonergan follows his graphic novel, Flower & Fade, with this charming and engrossing study of a friendship that transcends cultural borders. American Joe works as a teacher in post-Soviet Turkmenistan and acts as our fish-out-of-water everyman, confronted with customs and ways of thought that seem frustratingly pointless. Meanwhile, his native Turkmen friend Azat constantly finds his idealized impression of Americans and their society brought crashing to earth by Joe’s reality checks. Joe (and the reader) are taken in by Azat’s eternally sunny personality and ambitions that exceed his dreamer’s reality, taking us from one flight of entrepreneurial or romantic fancy to another while letting us get to know Azat’s highly critical mother and his bitter, alcoholic brother. Less of a straightforward narrative than a study of two very different men and the situations they find themselves in, this is a simply illustrated charmer that grips readers from its opening pages and remains on the mind well after it has been read and absorbed. This story about an American Peace Corps volunteer who befriends a man in Turkmenistan is told from the point of view of Joe, a stranger in a strange land. His closest companion becomes Azat, an irrepressible dreamer who believes in one doomed project after another. This story mixes comic and tragic elements to paint an empathetic portrait of a group of people who want the American Dream, even if they don’t exactly understand what it is or how it works. Lonergan’s black-and-white images are rendered in a minimalist style, telling this story by focusing on a series of smiling and troubled faces. Joe and Azat is based at least in part on the author’s Peace Corps experiences, but readers don’t see what kinds of things American volunteers did in Turkmenistan. In this book, Joe seems to spend most of his time going to parties and weddings and answering countless questions about what America is like. Azat is the main focus of this book, a tragic figure who continues to believe that his life is going to get better. But an even bigger tragedy seems to be how the American Dream tantalizes the people of this former Soviet republic, promising them freedoms and powers that are still out of reach.

Near mint, 1st print.