Book of the Week

The Arab of the Future, Volumes 1 and 2, by Riad Sattouf

Recommended by Mr Kemp

We have been here before. Nonfiction comics have for a long time now used simplistic cartoons to add something to the grimmer moments of the twentieth century. Art Spiegelman’s Maus does it for the Holocaust, Joe Sacco’s Palestine and Footnotes in Gaza document the turbulence of the Levant, and Iran’s Islamic Revolution is beautifully filigreed by Marjane Satrapi in Persepolis. 

The two volumes of Riad Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future could therefore quite easily be an interesting but rehashed version of all these masterpieces, but it is credit to the book that it manages to be original and thoughtful, brutal and charming, and, most importantly, as good as all the others.
These two volumes are the first in Sattouf’s long memoir of his youth an adolescence in Syria, Gaddafi’s Libya, and rural France. The third volume waits hungrily to be translated into English. The rest are sill being written. The six year old protagonist and his taciturn mother are pulled out of France by Sattouf’s quietly deranged Syrian father, whose passion for Pan-Arabism urges him to take up a dubious professorship at the University of Tripoli over a cushy job at Oxford. 

Sattouf’s descriptions of the grubby children, miserable lodgings, and backward mores that surround the young Sattouf are excellently uncomfortable. Seldom have fish been more out of water. Sattouf excels at the grotesque, presumably stemming from his time as a writer for Charlie Hebdo. But The Arab of the Future refuses to reduce itself to that magazine’s brand of provocative puerility. Sattouf’s book is deeply ambivalent and that is all for the good. When the young narrator accidentally sees two hanged bodies while on a family trip to a Homs market, the reader is not pummelled by authorial moralisations. Instead, we are left with the bare bones of the episode: two pairs of dangling feet; a shocked face on the boy; and a bad taste in the mouth. 

Sattouf’s presentation of his father is the best example of this narrative ambivalence. We see him in the beginning as a smart but rather bungling patriarch, desperate to instil in his son an appreciation for all things Arabic, and even more for all things Syrian. But as the book goes on his opinions become more extreme, his patriotism more militant. Comics have a tendency to overly guide the reader’s judgments, but Sattouf refuses to define his father for us. Most tellingly, the text doesn’t comment on Sattouf père’s reaction to those hanged men in Homs. It is left for us as readers to be shocked by the blasé way he endorses capital punishment as 'the only way to keep the people under control.' I was taken by surprise with the father’s movement towards extremism, and it looks set to get rather grim over the subsequent volumes. 

Ultimately, it is annoying to have finished these two volumes knowing that they are part of an as yet uncompleted series. This annoys because a) they are good, and b) they seem only to work properly when linked together. There is much of the chronicle in these books, where individual scenes and episodes gain a wider importance when chained to many, many others. Particularly, there is a bit which I won’t spoil at the end of the second book where something horrid happens, and I didn’t quite realise that the narrative had been building to that from almost the word go. Like Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, dramatic tension and symbolic importance are created by lots and lots of stuff happening bit by bit, building to an overall much bigger picture. I would prefer to see that bigger picture in one furious sitting, but will have to settle for 2/5 of it for now.