We received Riad Sattouf in Montpellier for the first volume of Arabe du Futur and we organized a meeting with him. You didn’t have to be a great scholar to already understand that he had signed an atypical and brilliant work. Which is also, we admit, easier to say in retrospect. In volume 6, the last one (Riad had announced three in 2014) we are in 1994 until 2011. he is 16 years old and feels bad about himself. He has not and rightly resolved the family problems of him, father, mother, brother kidnapped in Syria. Comics obsess him, he tries and success comes. Not quite a long, quiet river his life but, nonetheless, an example in more ways than one. Courage, sincerity, honesty, talent, Riad Sattouf has made, and we with him, an extraordinary journey in six volumes which will remain a reference.
He’s 16 Riad, not really in great shape or confident. A teenager in all his glory. His father left for Syria kidnapping his older brother. The younger one lives in Rennes with him and his mother who finds him tender and apathetic. Not even the joy in college, where he draws comics in class with his friend Yoann. No girls except an ugly girl who flirts with him. Letters from his father asking him to come to Syria. In prison he feels like Riad, has erotic dreams and is afraid of the military service that still exists. We need to reform, go through zinzin. His mother hires a somewhat bizarre lawyer who assures him that she will be able to recover his older brother in Syria. But it’s 30,000 euros. Grandparents have to help him. But grandfather Charles is sure that the lawyer is a crook. He’s right, which won’t help the family.
What makes a large part of the salt of this adventure is the narration, the dialogues, the ease with which we integrate the journey of this young man in the Middle East. Riad Sattouf says it all, shows it all. His psychological sessions are a model for their total authenticity. Sattouf does not play his role. It’s Riad, that’s all. Let’s go back to sincerity, to the thousand and one details told. Sfar, Sapin, he and Blain in their Paris studio where we met them for an interview with the author of Quai d’Orsay. The rejections then the debuts at Delcourt who knows how to find talents, the meeting with Émile Bravo, Guy Vidal of whom it can never be said enough what a great publisher he was, and finally the reunion with this distant brother, there is nothing to throw away in this continuation and end. We’ll almost regret it ending. We will miss this meeting where emotion, tenderness, humor but yes, they were united on one side Riad Sattouf the other.
The Arab of the future, Youth in the Middle East, Volume 6 (1994-2011), Allary Éditions, € 24.90
