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While Sattouf’s tuition was covered by a scholarship, he was on his own to pay for living expenses in Paris.
La vie paysanne et la rudesse de l'école à Ter Maaleh, les courses au marché noir à Homs, les dîners chez le cousin général mégalomane proche du régime, les balades assoiffées dans la cité antique de Palmyre : ce tome 2 nous plonge dans le quotidien hallucinant de la famille Sattouf sous la dictature d'Hafez Al-Assad. The author narration is impartial and very monotone, even his personal opinions on his past are very direct with not much hyperbole. This stunning memoir, reminiscent of a male Persepolis, was an award-winning bestseller when published in France.The work recounts Sattouf's childhood growing up in France, Libya and Syria in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Which makes me feel a) like my smart ladyfriends are right on the pulse of the philosophy and cultural criticism of the moment, but also that b) there is nothing new under the sun, and we are all only ever parroting things we've read and then drawing the same conclusions everyone else does when they digest the same thoughts from the same sources. Currently finalizing the second to last volume of his other successful series Cahiers d’Esther (published by Allary), Sattouf kept quiet about the "numerous projects" he is working on. Il raconte le combat toujours actif de sa mère pour récupérer Fadi et qui pense que son fils est resté petit, le vieillissement de ses grands-parents, l'aide qu'il apporte à sa famille pour renouer avec son père et Fadi en Syrie et l'inquiétude lors du déclenchement de la guerre en Syrie. Sattouf doesn’t do anything particularly special with his style of storytelling, either literally or visually, he just tells it straightforwardly but he does it so well.
Yet, his religiously conservative and critical voice remains omnipresent in a corner of the young Riad’s anxiety-ridden mind. The memoir is terrifying for what it tells us of the consciousness of a Sunni Arab man and his extended family, as well as the conditions in the cities of Tripoli and Homs. It also appeared in No sex in New York in 2004 on the initiative of the French left-wing daily Libération. The flood of rich, detailed, authentic, often completely unexpected observations is both disturbing and mesmerizing, thanks in part to the clever narrative strategy of presenting them from a vague through-the-eyes-of-a-child-yet-filtered-through-adult-awareness perspective that does not appear to have any agenda whatsoever: it appears to do little more than taking in all kinds of weirdness with wide-open eyes, though ultimately, of course, it does provide a critique of both Arab-Muslim and Western attitudes and lifestyles. In the same vein as Maus by Art Spiegelman and Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, The Arab of the Future is an autobiographical and political graphic novel.He’s an equal-opportunity satirist and claims that he is racist or has a pro-west agenda don’t ring true. He likened the strip to a fly-on-the-wall nature documentary, and rendered the speech of his subjects with careful attention to sociolinguistic variation. Despite his father’s determination to integrate his son into Arab society, little Sattouf—with his long blonde hair—never fully fits in, and this report reads like the curious pondering of an alien from another world.
Riad is de zoon van een Syrische vader en een Franse moeder, groeit op in Libië, Syrië, Saoudi-Arabië en Frankrijk, met en zonder zonder zijn broers en zussen (vader ontvoert zijn broer en verschuilt zich in Homs) en wordt een gevierd stripmaker en filmregisseur.The third volume (2016) sees him between the ages of six and nine, the time he becomes aware of the society he is growing up in (1985-1987). Part to a French mother and Syrian father, it details his young childhood in Libya, Syria, and France as his father receives jobs as an associate professor. From a very young age, Sattouf dreamed of producing his own bandes dessinées and there were a handful of adults in his life who recognized and encouraged his artistic leanings. Meme si on a parfois un peu l'impression de retrouver les carnets de Jerusalem ou de Joe Sacco, le style est tres personnel et on voyage vraiment a des annees lumieres. De tome en tome on découvre la pensée du personnage principal à travers un regard d’enfant, d’adolescent puis de jeune adulte avec une relecture mature des événements passés et de la façon de les raconter.
His family has a stack of Tin Tin comics which Sattouf has been "reading" on his own, making up stories to go with the pictures. Clementine is from a small village in Brittany and when they both graduate, Abdul-Razak accepts a position teaching in Tripoli, Libya.
An international publishing phenomenon, the six published volumes of The Arab of the Future have already sold more than 3. The first volume (2014) covers the period from 1978 to 1984: from birth to the age of six, little Riad is shuttled between Libya, Brittany and Syria.
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