There is a very fierce one-star review of this book on GR, which portrays Guy Delisle as a typically crass blundering North American who has nothing but contempt for the many religious and cultural rules and regulations he meets. Come to think of it, Gormenghast might be based on the Church of the Holy Sepulchre, you know, the one where they haven't been able to move that ladder since 1923 because thirteen Christian sects are competing for ownership of the ledge the ladder in standing on and the window its top is resting on.
Jerusalem makes Gormenghast look like a late Mondrian painting. Jerusalem is surely the prickliest place on earth – I haven't checked in the Guinness Book of World Records but can anywhere match its fantastic interconnected four-dimensional jigsaw webs of crossbraided Gordian-knotted undisentanglable multiple overlaid and palimpsested political, religious, geographical and psychological complexities? I don't think so. Mr Delisle's missus works as an administrator for MSF so she spends a year here, a year there, and he trails along, as do the kids. This one is an account of a year as a "trailing spouse" in Jerusalem. On Friday I went to this really dull party.) I would buy all of them, every one, except that these are the least value-for-money books ever, they're always really pricey and you can read them in a couple of hours. ( On Thursday I tried to find a playgroup for my kids. I love these graphic autobiographers and their concentration on the miniscule humdrum realities of their ordinary lives.
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