The Arab of the Future 4: A Graphic Memoir of a Childhood in the Middle East, 1987-1992

by Riad Sattouf

Overview

The penultimate installment in the bestselling French graphic memoir series—hailed as “exquisitely illustrated” and “irresistible”—covering the years of Riad Sattouf’s adolescence, from 1987-1992.

In the fourth volume of The Arab of the Future, little Riad has grown into a teenager. In the previous books, his childhood was complicated by the pull of his two cultures—French and Syrian—and his parents’ deteriorating relationship. Now his father, Adbel-Razak, has left to take a job in Saudi Arabia, and after making a pilgrimage to Mecca, turns increasingly towards religion. But after following him from place to place and living for years under the harsh conditions of his impoverished village, Riad’s mother Clementine has had enough. Refusing to live in a country where women have no rights, she returns with her children to live in France with her own mother… until Abdel-Razak shows up unexpectedly to drag the family on yet another journey.

As the series builds to a climax, we see Riad struggle with problems both universal (bullies at school) and specific (his mother’s sudden illness, the judgment of his religious relatives). And as Abdel-Razak returns again to the same fantastical dreams he pursued in previous books, we see him become more and more unhinged, until ultimately he crosses the line from idealism to fanaticism, leading to a dramatic breaking point.

Full of the same gripping storytelling and lush visual style for which Sattouf’s previous works have won numerous awards, The Arab of the Future 4 continues the saga of the Sattouf family and their peripatetic life in France and the Middle East.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781250150660
Publisher:	Holt, Henry & Company, Inc.
Publication date:	11/05/2019
Series:	Arab of the Future Series , #4
Pages:	288
Sales rank:	480,828
Product dimensions:	6.40(w) x 9.20(h) x 1.00(d)

About the Author

Riad Sattouf is a best-selling cartoonist and filmmaker who grew up in Syria and Libya and now lives in Paris. The author of four comics series in France and a former contributor to the satirical publication Charlie Hebdo, Sattouf is now a weekly columnist for l’Obs. He also directed the films The French Kissers and Jacky in the Women’s Kingdom.

Editorial Reviews

★ 08/12/2019

The phenomenal penultimate volume of Sattouf’s epic five-part autobiography takes a dark turn, charting the French-Syrian cartoonist’s descent into puberty in the late 1980s and early ’90s as his family fractures around him. Leaving childhood means leaving a life insulated from the cares and expectations of adults; the relationship between Sattouf’s father and mother is so contemptuous it’s brought out each other’s worst impulses. “I’ve had it up to here with Arabs!” Sattouf’s French-born mother screams during an argument. Meanwhile, Sattouf’s Syrian-born father, once a promising young academic, finds comfort and social acceptance in the embrace of fundamentalist religion and nationalism—which transform him into a misogynist and virulent anti-Semite. Sattouf’s parents now live apart, with his father teaching in Saudi Arabia and sending money to France, where Sattouf, his siblings, and his mother live. As an adolescent, Sattouf is more of a witness to this schism than an active participant, and his concerns center around a growing awareness of his body’s transformation, the loss of his childhood cuteness, and navigating the social politics of middle school. Drawn with broad comedic cartoons, these moments keep the toxic destruction of his family from overwhelming the narrative. Sattouf depicts the disappointments and uncertainties of growing up in a unique multicultural world in a way that’s sometimes tense, sometimes humorous, and always brilliant. (Nov.)

Publishers Weekly

"Brilliant, sensational and heartbreaking, The Arab of the Future 4 hits all the high and low notes without skipping a beat, setting up a thrilling conclusion to the series."
—Comics Beat

"Struck through with moments of terrible violence and subtle revelation, The Arab of the Future will be regarded as a vital text for future generations eager to understand the vastly complex and often brutal landscape of the Middle East at the close of the 20th century."
—Shelf Awareness

Praise for The Arab of the Future:

"I tore through two volumes of 'The Arab of the Future,' by Riad Sattouf—it’s the most enjoyable graphic novel I’ve read in a while. "
—Zadie Smith, The New York Times Book Review

“A deft and devastating graphic memoir . . . both sensitive and biting . . . Along the way, we get a fine-grained, first-person account of the brutality of Syria under Hafez al-Assad and Libya under Muammar Qaddafi.”
—New York Review of Books

“Exquisitely illustrated, and filled with experiences of misfortune bordering on the farcical, Mr. Sattouf’s book is a disquieting yet essential read.”
—Carmela Ciuraru, The New York Times

“Darkly ironic . . . Sattouf’s father is the same immature, posturing figure familiar from volume 1—the family can only trail along in the mercurial patriarch’s wake. Under Sattouf’s pen, this state of affairs becomes an ingeniously apt microcosm of the larger world he grew up in.”
—NPR

From the Publisher

06/01/2019

Covering the years 1987–92, this penultimate installment of a best-selling memoir limning a life caught between the French and Syrian cultures sees French cartoonist Sattouf reaching his teenage years. His father became increasingly religious after leaving Syria to take a job in Saudi Arabia, and his fed-up mother returned with her children to live with her mother in France. There, Sattouf endured bullies at school and judgmental relatives at home—and then his father reappeared, forcing a crisis.

Library Journal

2019-07-01
The fourth and penultimate volume in Sattouf's epic graphic memoir.

With this installment, which follows The Arab of the Future: The Circumcision Years: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1985-1987 (2018), the impressive scope and scale of the series becomes clearer. It has taken three volumes for the author to get to his 10th birthday, and the opening pages of this book find him living with his mother and siblings in her native France while his father pursues his fantasies of wealth, financial independence, and early retirement as a professor in Saudi Arabia. Here, Sattouf's father seems more determinedly Muslim than ever, convinced that the family's future lies in the Middle East, where he finds both the morals and the prospects for a future higher. "We'll live like lords," he insists. However, the author's mother remained resistant, seeing a better life for herself and a better education for her children in the West, and specifically in France. Meanwhile, the young Sattouf shuttled between the cultures; he found his father's religion strange and forgot how to speak his native tongue while immersed in the French school system. On one visit to his father, he was told, "You're a French kid with an Arab name. You're not a real Arab." He also endured homosexual epithets, partly because others found the way he spoke effeminate and partly because of his predilection for drawing—the art that may well provide the key to his identity across cultures. It's clear this was an awkward time, as early adolescence is for most. During the five years of this narrative, Sattouf will reach his midteens, experience some sexual confusion and awakening, see his hair turn from blond to brown, develop an ungainly body with an oversized head, and go from being "pretty cute" to "the ugliest boy in the class." Nor can he find any stability outside himself, as the center of his parents' marriage cannot hold, and international relations find the West and Middle East in mortal combat.

Stay tuned for the finale.

Kirkus Reviews