Son père, lui, n'a qu'une idée en tête: que son fils Riad aille à l'école syrienne et devienne un Arabe moderne et éduqué, un Arabe du futur. She draws parallels between the rural France of the past, exemplified by her elderly neighbor who lives in extremely rustic conditions, and the developing Arab world of the modern era.

He's blind to his many faults and contradictions as he tries to live something of a Western life in a Middle Eastern world.Terwijl Riad zich in Parijs, in zijn eentje, doorheen opleidingen en eerste jobs spartelt en de kritiek van zijn vader in zijn hoofd weergalmt, staat de wereld in brand, storten in NYC de WTC-blokken in en bereikt de Arabische Lente ook Syrië. On découvre avec ce dernier tome de la saga - qui aurait pu s’appeler la Mort du père - comment le jeune Riad finit par surmonter une histoire familiale mouvementée et traumatisante, pour se transformer en auteur de BD à succès. The family travels to the Bailiwick of Jersey to retrieve Abdul-Razak's Libyan salary, in cash, from his offshore bank account. The bulk of the texts takes place in Syria, and while the drawings are highly stylized, the brutality and poverty of life in rural Syria under Hafez al-Assad is palpable.

The absurdities and horrors of life living in these countries will make you laugh, outraged, and sorrowful. Sattouf's father, obsessed with hunting, takes him out and shoots the only game they can find--sparrows perched on a telephone wire. I’m sure Arab of the Future isn’t for everyone but I don’t think I suggested that you give it a longer try.

His parents had divorced and his father, Abel, had kidnapped his youngest brother, Fadi, and fled to Syria. Sattouf, whose mother is French and father is Syrian, zigzagged his way through childhood, moving between his parents’ respective homelands as well as Libya.

Die Geschichte ist trocken, detailreich und liebevoll erzählt und gezeichnet, dabei entsteht viel Humor. Issu d'un milieu pauvre, féru de politique et obsédé par le panarabisme, Abdel-Razak Sattouf élève son fils Riad dans le culte des grands dictateurs arabes, symboles de modernité et de puissance virile. The work recounts Sattouf's childhood growing up in France, Libya and Syria in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. Neuware -Né en 1978 d'un père syrien et d'une mère bretonne, Riad Sattouf grandit d'abord à Tripoli, en Libye, où son père vient d'être nommé professeur. In Ma circoncision, he denounced circumcision as a cruel and absurd act, superimposed on the context of the socio-political life in his ancestral Syria in the 1980s.Well, things did not quite go as planned, but, I think it is important to not gloss over the things we believed in our childhood, as they affect how we develop our world views as adults. While Sattouf’s tuition was covered by a scholarship, he was on his own to pay for living expenses in Paris. While his cousins give him a hard time (it doesn’t help that he is blond), the young Riad discovers the harshness of traditional farmer life. Second, how maddening it is that someone like Sattouf, or like Karl Ove Knausgaard, or like so so many Important Literary Men, gets to endlessly meander with the utmost self-importance through the gruelingly mundane minutia of his entire life over the course of (far too) many books, whereas when was the last time a woman got a multi-book deal on the idea of just, you know, talking about every single piddling detail of her life?

If you didn’t see kids joyriding their dads’ cars, it’d be like time-travelling back to the Middle Ages! recently also read the whole collection, thanks to one of my French students who wanted to read them with me. You would almost think so, were it not that he also clearly portrays French Brittany (the home of his mother) as backward. And hold they do, though food is scarce, children kill dogs for sport, and with locks banned, the Sattoufs come home one day to discover another family occupying their apartment.The details are salient and feel real, but a lot of the bigger context is missing; possibly purposely since Sattouf himself wouldn't have had context beyond snippets of news and overheard adult conversation at the time. It's as much his father's story as his own as he comes home and complains to his family every evening. Dans ce dernier tome, l'auteur relate son entrée dans la vie adulte : sa vie étudiante, son entrée dans le monde de la bande-dessinée. Moving from France to Libya to a family compound in Syria, cultural and marital cracks begin to appear in this volume. The following year, Clémentine and the children again spend the school year in Brittany, then join Abdul-Razak in Syria for the holidays.