A fascinating graphic novel shaped by a childhood in paradise explores life in a religious community

Emmanuel Lepage’s “Skrivača-udarača” combines autobiographical reportage, a small-scale history, anthropological research and a regional novel, according to Miljenko Jergović’s literary recommendation.

The French comic artist, born in 1966, is known for expansive graphic documentary novels, often focused on travel. Jergović says this book is drawn and written in the manner of television series about contemporary history, using documentary images and monologues from witnesses to an era.

Lepage is writing about the world in which he grew up, Jergović says, a world that no longer exists and now seems almost unbelievable. His parents belonged to the lower middle class and postwar proletariat. They were Catholics involved in the associations and movements of their time, amid the revolutionary upheavals that preceded 1968.

The review places the book within a wider discussion of documentary prose, documentary fiction, autobiography and autofiction. It traces those forms through European literary history, from Jean-Jacques Rousseau and nineteenth-century realism to Joyce, Hemingway, Truman Capote, Jorge Luis Borges and writers who recorded their own lives, including Varlam Shalamov and Imre Kertész.

Jergović argues that one element has received less attention: the role of imagination. His conclusion is that writing does not need to invent events in order to imagine them.