The Contradictions by Sophie Yanow review – on the road with a raging bore
This comic, the original web version of which has already received an Eisner award, arrives with high praise both from Alison Bechdel, the bestselling author of Fun Home (“surprisingly, even transcendently, emotional”), and from Tillie Walden, best known for her acclaimed memoir Spinning (“makes you want to laugh and cry simultaneously”). It’s not hard to see why. Let us ignore, for a moment, the pandemic; the fact that nothing about university life is quite as it was, or should be, right now. This funny and very knowing graphic novel will still strike an exceedingly loud chord with anyone who is, or has ever been, a fresher, far from home and all at sea. Open it and you can almost smell the Nescafé. Booksellers should throw in a free jar of the stuff with every copy sold.
The confused and somewhat apathetic heroine of The Contradictions is Sophie (possibly a version of the book’s author, Sophie Yanow), an American studying in Paris. Broke and lonely, she thinks her prayers may have been answered when she meets her compatriot Zena, the proud rider of a fixed gear bicycle (Sophie loves bikes, though she has left her own back at home). But beware those first-term friends! Her new pal turns out to be a moody, shoplifting, vegan anarchist, and when Zena suggests that the two of them spend a few days together hitchhiking to Berlin via Amsterdam, the reader knows the trip can’t possibly end well. It would be hard enough to tolerate Zena’s particular brand of self-righteousness in a luxury hotel room, but to have to listen to her anti-capitalist mutterings in a tiny tent pitched by a motorway service station surely cannot result in anything less than murderous thoughts and a powerful longing for a cheeseburger.
Sophie, though, is a little too docile for murderous thoughts – and in any case, Zena’s half-baked ideas and startling hypocrisies are ultimately not half so exasperating as her complete lack of interest in her surroundings. “Paris is a cheap whore,” she tells one of the drivers who pick them up. “She’s for sale to the highest bidder.” And so it goes on. No museum nor gallery, no matter how great, is of any interest at all to Zena; European food, with its dependence on meat, butter and cheese, is in her eyes simply disgusting. All poor Sophie can do is follow her around, feeling hungry, nuts being just about the only thing she’s permitted to eat in Zena’s presence.
Drawn in black and white, Yanow’s figures are a couple of rectangles topped by the circles of their anoraks, rucksacks and spectacles, while the boulevards and canals around them appear hardly at all. But though such a pared-back style can hardly be said to be beautiful, it’s perfect here. As they trudge from city to city, their days bereft of beauty, variety and everyday joy, Sophie and Zena could be almost anywhere. In the end, for all its comedy, The Contradictions is a book about how principles, if too firmly held, can make a person blind – not just to new ideas, but to all the good things in the world.
• The Contradictions by Sophie Yanow is published by Drawn & Quarterly (£19.99). To order a copy go to guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply
