Exile is worth the journey: Dany Laferrière has carried this title with him for several decades. If exile is a theme present in several of his books, he had to live and master his art enough to talk about his exile without self-pity. "If I wrote this book (in doing, there is writing and drawing), it is because I was fed up with people only associating exile with pain."

In this third graphic novel, we find the same tangle of voices and places that make these books so unique. New York is under the gaze of photographer Annie Leibovitz and painter Edward Hopper, not to mention its emblematic writers like Truman Capote and Salinger. It is an opportunity to stroll through Buenos Aires with his old master Borges, in this "sweet suburban street softened by trees and sunsets". Paris has hints of ambition and alcohol in the company of Haitian novelist Jean-Claude Charles, this "moving man". In Cayenne, the heavy rains call for rum and the reading of Debord's The Society of the Spectacle. We are as moved as we are indignant to read Toussaint Louverture's letter to Bonaparte, in February 1802, meticulously copied by the novelist.

Exile is Worth the Trip is the most Montreal of Dany Laferrière's graphic novels. Arriving in the summer of 1976, the cultural, social and climatic shock, the hard jobs and that "filthy and bright" room. Starting to write at the insistence of the owner of the Soleil levant - the bar where the writer sees Nina Simone pass by - to give himself a presence with the young McGill university students, without which the winter is unbearable. Writing naked, in the morning, while his lover is still asleep. Rue Saint-Denis - "my favorite street" - an artery of desire and escape where girls, poets and tramps mingle. Where Laferrière felt at home, sitting with his back to the street, on a bench in the Saint-Louis square, that mythical place in Quebec literature, a character in his own right in How to Make Love to a Negro Without Getting Tired.

Through the graphic novel, Dany Laferrière combines his exile with the exiles of his masters, he mixes the intimate and the historical, and above all he thwarts regret and fatality.