"The Photographer" by Emmanuel Guibert, Didier Lefèvre, and Frédéric Lemercier

God love the world’s innovative storytellers. A very recent case in point: The Photographer, a large soft-cover book about a dangerous and almost-forgotten trip into Afghanistan in 1986 with Médecins Sans Frontières, or doctors without borders.

Now on American bookshelves more than two decades since its events took place, The Photographer relays the fascinating tale of a humanitarian odyssey into a country whose relevance today virtually goes without saying. Led by Dr. Juliette Fournot and documented by Didier Lefèvre, who died in January 2007 at the age of 49, the MSF team surges heroically into one of the country’s most dangerous provinces to find in Afghanistan a place of terrible beauty populated by stark and, at times, brutal sadness.

What sets The Photographer apart from almost every book that has come before is its unusual collage of photographs and comic strips – all varying in size from a thumbnail to a full-page spread – woven together into one incredible story. Or, really it is more than that. It is a travel memoir filtered through the mechanisms of a graphic novel.

The Photographer’s graphics were sketched by Emmanuel Guibert, a close friend of Lefèvre. Narration in the panels is the product of Lefèvre’s oral accounts of this, his first major assignment as a photographer – and it was not without its terrifying effects on Lefèvre’s psyche, evidenced in portions of the book’s narrative and detailed in its epilogue. (The trip cost him 14 teeth upon his return to France as a result of contracting a chronic disease called furunculosis, or the emergence of painful, pus-filled boils on the skin.)

It's difficult to do justice to such an affecting book as this. The illustrations and photos, arranged by graphic designer Frédéric Lemercier, propel the story in a hypnotic and layered, back and forth kind of way, doing a worthy and unique job of conveying the heartbreak and chaos of both the Afghan people and the MSF’s efforts.

Shrapnel, disease, death – no one was immune to the side-effects of war. The presence of cameras inside this humanitarian mission winds up having a curious effect on the reader as he or she is brought deeper into the story of The Photographer. The tragedies and familial traumas of war which our televisions scrub away for us are laid out via the gifted lens of Lefèvre and his experience with others, such as Dr. Juliette Fournot, in the MSF mission.

Because many of these pictures had never been seen before, The Photographer contains within its covers an honesty and freshness other books only dream of, for these things really occurred. Some of the pictures have on the surface what might be called a banal quality, but closer inspection reveals a broader truth to this tale. At one point, there is a funeral procession passing led by a woman is holding a baby in her arms shouting “Ahmadjan!” repeatedly. When they have passed, Didier stops Juliette, who is holding a camcorder.
“He died?” he asks.
“Yes,” she says.
Ahmadjan was the little boy’s name.
“He must have had internal bleeding,” says Juliette.
“What did his cries mean? ‘Aoh! Aoh!’” asks Didier.
“That he is thirsty.”
Didier nods to the camcorder, seeing then that Juliette had filmed the child’s death.
Juliette: “The mother said to me, ‘Film it, Jamila. People have to know.’”

When Lefèvre came back to France from the mission, he brought with him some 4,000 pictures from Afghanistan. A mere six of them were published by Libération, a French paper in late December 1986. Due to personal motivations on Lefèvre’s part, the rest of his MSF work wasn‘t supposed to be seen by anyone other than close friends. It was Guibert who, over the years, conveyed to him how he’d always felt it an injustice locking up all those pictures. Thirteen years later, Guibert convinced Lefèvre to making the book that only recently has been translated into English by Alexis Siegel.

If there is something to discount in The Photographer, it is that the graphics themselves lack a certain detailed finish or polish. But this doesn’t have to be bad news. In fact, it seems to serves the book’s larger purpose. That is, to expose the heroics of this almost forgotten photojournalist named Didier Lefèvre. That he was able to inspire friends to resurrect his work and collaborate to tell a story such as this so creatively is a testament to the remarkable talents of this overlooked man who died entirely soon. (R.I.P. Mr. Lefèvre.)

"Livability" by Jon Raymond

In the Acknowledgments section of Jon Raymond’s short story collection, Livability, you’ll find a shout-out to Kelly Reichardt for, as Raymond puts it, “seeing something here.” It’s an apt thanks because without Ms. Reichardt’s cooperation adapting two of Raymond’s tales – “Old Joy” and “Train Choir” – into feature-length films, it is doubtful such a timely writer as Raymond would have ever gotten the kind of exposure he’s enjoyed since.

Doubtful, but not certain, because Raymond, see, is a quietly talented writer, one whose creative instincts would have earned him a following regardless of where he worked. Lucky for proud Oregonians, Raymond’s tales are rooted firmly in the American Northwest and he’s taken advantage of the creative spirits both in the Portland area and along the West Coast.

“Old Joy” is the opening story in Livability and this is its third incarnation. In late 2004, Artspace Books in San Francisco published a 72-page collaboration between Raymond and photographer Justine Kurland. Guided by Kurland’s photos – which, according to an interview with Raymond in the San Francisco Bay Guardian, focus on the landscape and with “legacies of ‘60s liberalism and utopianism” – Raymond composed a lean narrative of old friends struggling to connect on a trip to remote hot springs deep in a mountain forest.

Both with that story and his third in this collection, “The Coast,” Raymond’s fiction conveys troubled longing while evoking a strong sense of place for his characters. “The Coast” relays the events of a few days not long after a man’s wife is all too quickly killed in a bicycle accident. The narrator takes time off to vacation in the same coastal house he and his wife occasioned in Newport, Ore. While there, he considers exactly how much he ought to grieve and what it means to honor and respect her memory, in lieu of an old friend’s fateful reemergence.

We didn’t talk long, just enough to catch up on the recent news: Karin’s new restaurant, Dan’s new dog. When her dinner arrived, she asked me to stay, but I decided I’d been there long enough. I figured I still owed it to my dead wife to despair a little this evening.
“But maybe I’ll see you around?” I said.
“Definitely,” she said. “I’m here until Monday.”
“I’m here until Monday, too,” I said, and hurriedly, as her plate steamed, we exchanged cell phone numbers and hugged one more time.
“I really can’t believe you’re here,” she said again.
“Your food’s getting cold,” I said. “I’ll talk to you later.”
“You better.”

There’s also a frank, familiar quality to his character’s speech patterns that reflects a segment of the 18-35 demographic in a kind of fresh and welcome manner. One man’s luggage is mere “crap” he throws on the floor, a girl is described as “moony” and one girl can’t “tell whether David, the critic, is gay or what.”

“Train Choir,” the final story in this collection, was the second of Raymond’s stories Ms. Reichardt adapted for the big screen. Released in 2008 by the name of “Wendy and Lucy” and met with wide critical acclaim, this last story follows a female drifter and her dog as she treks north to Alaska. Written in the wake of Hurricane Katrina as a meditation on poverty, “Train Choir” is at times an angry, desperate story of what it’s like to hopelessly try to get a foothold on middle-class American life. It and the rest of the stories in the collection are drawn in lines melancholic, but clean and efficient: never do revelations (when they come) seem unlikely and rarely is the stroke that’s drawn awkward or improbable.

Raymond’s storytelling works in spare, honest prose. It is a style that aches in ways a consumer-conscious, environmentally-friendly generation of young adults will recognize. His characters try to quiet the nostalgia American life evokes when living in the city while pining for quieter, less cluttered places which are increasingly difficult to find. The timeliness of Raymond’s writing is an enticing, modest accomplishment. That it is so pinned-down to a region the author clearly knows well, and that this region is populated by such reflective and contemporary characters – these things make the experience of reading Livability like spending a summer in one of Oregon’s coastal towns. A place of beautiful, aging, battered shorelines. A place not fully spoiled by consumerism, and where dreams haven’t been abandoned so much as traded at a more honest price. It is the price of life in America today.