That being said, this is an account of the very early years spent by the author in Libya, France and Syria - but also the story of his father, an Arab who studied in France to get his ph.D. and who married a French woman. Dans le deuxième tome, il raconte particulièrement les conditions de sa vie d'écolier dans son village rural syrien Ter Maaleh avec le déroulement des cours, les relations entre les enfants, la place de la religion et de la politique dans le système scolaire ainsi que la pression scolaire exercée par son père. Comic books of childhood under Arab dictators grip France". France 24. 17 June 2015 . Retrieved 4 February 2016. Riad’s drawing skill is such that one can envision the environment quite clearly. It is better than a photograph since Riad can add the elements he wishes to emphasize. In the New York Times review of this title, as well as that in the New Yorker magazine, called "Drawing Blood", we learn that Riad has a few more installments planned for this series, and I look forward eagerly to other adventures as he grows older. He has a viewpoint that is not all sarcasm. He so far has spared his mother, who comes across as a bewildered alien in a hostile environment. a b et c (en) Adam Shatz, « Drawing Blood», sur The New Yorker, 19 octobre 2015 (consulté le 27 décembre 2016)

Julia Dumont, « L’Arabe du futur 2: l’enfance syrienne de Riad Sattouf séduit les lecteurs», sur france24.com, 14 juin 2015 (consulté le 28 septembre 2015). The Arab of the Future begins in France, where Riad Sattouf is born in 1978. He describes himself as a “perfect” little boy with "platinum-blonde hair" and “bright puppy-dog eyes.” Riad is the eldest son of Clémentine, a reserved French woman, and Abdul-Razak Sattouf, a flamboyant Sunni-Syrian man. They met when Clémentine took pity on Abdul-Razak's clueless failure to attract a friend of hers. Riad Sattouf: avec L'Arabe du futur 4 "'je ne paie plus l'ISF qui n'existe plus"», sur Challenges (consulté le 28 août 2019)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. He’s a natural storyteller who’s perfectly suited to the comics medium and that makes reading this such a joy. L'Arabe du futur de Riad Sattouf remporte le Los Angeles Times Book Prize», sur L'Obs (consulté le 12 avril 2016)

La réception critique dans le monde est excellente [15 ]: le tome 2 est élu «roman graphique du mois» par le journal anglais The Guardian [16 ] et le New York Times le qualifie d' «artistiquement exceptionnel» [17 ]. The Arab of the Future: A Graphic Memoir by Riad Sattouf". thearabofthefuture.com . Retrieved 2016-11-02. L'Arabe du futur est une série de bande dessinée autobiographique de Riad Sattouf créée en 2014 et publiée par Allary Éditions. La série compte 6 tomes. As you would expect, it’s mostly focused on Riad and his family but we also learn what life was like in these countries at the time as well. For example Libya under Gaddafi where housing was free to all - like a bizarre game of finders keepers, you found somewhere that was empty and moved in! - and the basic foods that were doled out to everyone because supermarkets didn’t exist. It was a third world country and, reading the excerpts from Gaddafi’s Green Book here, it’s easy to see why conditions were so bad when this lunatic was running the show!

Sattouf's childhood is the stage on which the events of the novel play out. From the nascent regime of Gaddafi to the more insidious, but no less dangerous regime of Assad, Sattouf uses an acerbic humour to explore life in three dictatorships, two political and the third under his increasingly despotic father; whilst the former two are far more dangerous and have a far bigger impact on the wider world, the latter defines the small world which defines Sattouf's childhood. Clémentine has refused to take the family to Saudi Arabia, so instead she and the children are living in Brittany without Abdul-Razak. At the end of the school term, he pays them a surprise visit and takes them on holiday to Syria. The following year, Clémentine and the children again spend the school year in Brittany, then join Abdul-Razak in Syria for the holidays. He has become a more devout muslim, and strongly disapproves of Clémentine's secular ideas. By the end of the volume, tensions between Clémentine and Abdul-Razak lead to their breakup. Abdul-Razak takes the family's savings and their youngest child Fadi to Syria, leaving Clémentine in Brittany with the two older children. Riad’s Syrian father, Abdul-Razak, is the first of his family to read and is (therefore?) considered a great scholar in Syria. He is sent to study history at the Sorbonne and manages to wed an unworldly French student, Clementine, who is studying in Paris. Clementine is from a small village in Brittany and when they both graduate, Abdul-Razak accepts a position teaching in Tripoli, Libya. You have got to read this to enjoy it. I don’t want to spoil your fun. It sounds just about what you might expect with Qaddafi in charge, only even worse than you could imagine. Purposefully written from the perspective of a child, Sattouf employs simplistic yet comprehensive drawings that are more rudimentary than, yet not entirely dissimilar to, his other works such as La vie secrète des jeunes, his column in the famous satirical French magazine Charlie Hebdo. [5] Both The Arab of the Future and La Vie Secrète des Jeunes are written from Sattouf's point of view, with the former describing his childhood and the latter his daily observations as an adult. Although both appear autobiographical, at least one reviewer calls into question elements of Sattouf's life story and family history. [2] In 2020, Sattouf announced the memoir's fifth volume was finished with only one extra volume pending before finalizing the saga. [6] Plot [ edit ] Vol. 1: 1978–1984 [ edit ] Il se base principalement sur ses souvenirs, et cela explique les références régulières aux odeurs et le point de vue enfantin [5 ].

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. Sattouf engages our sympathies immediately by starting out his descriptions from the eyes of a blond two-year-old, who we might expect to be perplexed wherever he was, being new to the world. But this turns out to be the perfect vehicle for presenting the things he sees, hears, smells, and experiences with a disingenuous honesty (though, I must admit, the consciousness of a child). It is as disarming as it is damning. We laugh and cringe at the same time.The author speaking of his father: "In 1967 he had been devastated by the Six Day War, when Egypt, Jordan and Syria were crushed by the Israelis. Then, in 1973, like all the Syrians of his generation he managed to transform the Arab defeat in the Yom Kippur War into an "almost victory".

en) Japan Media Arts Festival Archive, « Manga Division | 2020 [23rd]», sur Japan Media Arts Festival Archive (consulté le 27 mai 2021) Dans le premier tome, Riad décrit la rencontre de ses parents et leur installation en Libye, puis au village de Ter Maaleh en Syrie. Il pose les bases des thématiques principales de la série: l'image du père, le contexte géopolitique au Moyen-Orient de l'époque et le contraste entre les cultures et traditions européennes et orientales. In Arabic, the names Riad and Sattouf had what he described as “an impressive solemnity.” In French, they sounded like rire de sa touffe, which means “laugh at her pussy.” When teachers took attendance, “people would burst out laughing. It was impossible for a girl to date a guy whose name meant ‘I laughed at your pussy.’ ” As a result, he said, “I lived a very violent solitude. " Snaije, Olivia (28 October 2015). "Riad Sattouf draws on multicultural past for The Arab of the Future". The Guardian . Retrieved 4 February 2016. 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. The thing is: the results don't feel pedantic or manipulative in the slightest, and this is crucial to the appeal of the story. Just following the father around is an experience unlike any I’ve ever had: I mean, I never know what this guy is going to do or say next, because his belief system and his values seem so all-over-the-place to me… and yet, somehow, magically, he feels like a perfectly organic human being. Which is what makes all the strangeness and madness and uncertainty so compelling!

Carmela Ciuraru. "New Novels by Paul Murray, César Aira and Others". The New York Times . Retrieved 2016-11-02. Le tome 2 mentionnait des éditions en 15 langues: français, allemand, anglais, brésilien, catalan, coréen, danois, espagnol, finnois, italien, néerlandais, norvégien, polonais, portugais et suédois. Abdul-Razak obtains a teaching job in Syria and the family moves to his hometown Teir Maalah, near Homs. Riad encounters severe bullying, in which two cousins accuse him of being Jewish and mercilessly torment him—seemingly because of his blond hair and foreign mother. The cousins' enmity appears to be entangled with a financial dispute between their father and Riad's father. Riad also witnesses strict segregation of genders and sects, media censorship, animal abuse, corruption, poor sanitation, and crippling poverty. Riad befriends Wael and Mohammad, two other cousins who teach him Syrian Arabic; they try to protect him from the two bullies, who are their uncles though around the same age. Riad observes the cult of personality surrounding Hafez al-Assad, who he sees as more sinister than Libya's Gaddafi. Abdul-Razak wants Riad to begin school, but Clémentine fears he is too young—then forbids it entirely after witnessing a group of boys torture and kill a puppy for sport.