Lindsey, Ursula (27 January 2016). "The Future of the Arab". The Nation . Retrieved 4 February 2016. The child Riad has a spark of intelligence, but is easily impressed by those around him - he can draw decently (no surprise there), he thinks his father is Amazing (even when, as adults, we realize he's definitely not) and tries to fit in with peers.

Los Angeles Book Prizes 2015 dans la catégorie Graphic Novel/comics [22 ] , [23 ] pour la version américaine ( The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984: A Graphic Memoir) 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! 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.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. This memoir in the form of a graphic novel by Riad Sattouf is positively terrifying. It only takes an evening to read, and I can guarantee you will not want to put it down.

Jean-Pierre Filiu, « L'Arabe du futur: Riad Sattouf raconte la Syrie et la Libye de son enfance», Rue89,‎ 29 mai 2014 ( lire en ligne) It was strange, later, to read the New Yorker profile of Sattouf from a few years ago, because it contends with all those subjects and issues too. 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. I dunno.

Then as the family finally leaves - solely due to the father's own motivations yet again - the young son who is maybe 5 looks up and sees a woman with bare boobs through a window. Yes, this is considered an important enough life moment to be a highlight of a graphic memoir. JFC. 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! Yet his father had chosen to study abroad to avoid doing military service in Syria, which lasted several years." It might be said, though, that the emulation of other people's behavior is one of the themes of the novel. Little Riad is encouraged by the Syrian women in his family's circle to engage in violent play with other boys, and he finds it enjoyable. The children around him emulate adults' violent behavior. Ideas seem to travel around, transmitted from mind to mind.

With Clémentine transcribing his words and "rendering them intelligible," Abdul-Razak obtains a Ph.D. in history from the Sorbonne. In 1980, he moves the family to Libya after accepting a job as an associate professor. (He is paid in US dollars, with the funds sent to an account in the Channel Islands.) Prix Sproing de la meilleure bande dessinée étrangère 2016 [24 ] pour la version norvégienne ( (no) Fremtidens araber)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. 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. L'Arabe du futur de Riad Sattouf remporte le Los Angeles Times Book Prize», sur L'Obs (consulté le 12 avril 2016)