The Contradictions
Sophie Yanow
Reviewed by Scot Langland
Sophie Yanow’s Eisner-winning graphic novel, The Contradictions, is a revelatory exploration of hitchhiking across Europe, living other people’s journeys, and finding out that anarchism isn’t all that it’s cracked up to be. Politics, poverty, loneliness, parenting, the law—all are fraught with contradictions.
Yanow does her own black and white illustration providing the thin lines of the world, and the people in it, space to breath and exist. Whether it is finding out that the promised zen does not appear from a road trip or from motorcycle maintenance or from brushing off a badass museum, Sophie, Yanow’s self-protagonist stand-in, learns that living someone else’s story by fitting in will cost more than anticipated.
All good coming of age stories deal with pushing back against rules and expectations; Yanow’s contradictions show her own self-acceptance. To use a term like autofiction wouldn’t be quite right, but it gets at what Yanow does so earnestly and sincerely—telling a story about learning who you really are and what boundaries are needed to preserve that self, and of course there is the always fun lesson of how to use wikis to find the right French gas stations to hitchhike a ride away from Paris.
The humor in this book shines at its brightest in the myriad of characters which offer to give rides to Sophie and her anarchist vegan friend Zena: Greeks speaking Turkish, a famous Belgian photographer who walked from Amsterdam to Istanbul, and two stoners speaking English in a wonderfully crafted French accent.
Yanow’s art is breathtakingly understated and masterfully weighted. Yanow, when asked about the difference between comics in France and America, said that in France, all comic artists are trained as fine artists, and Yanow’s emotive, thin lines do more work developing character and theme than most fiction does with entire plotlines. Sophie Yanow is a revelation.