Just bought Riad Sattouf’s new book (it’s just been released in English). I’m looking forward to it.
There’s an interesting profile on Sattouf by Adam Shatz in The New Yorker:
Sattouf himself seemed to want people to read as little into his work as possible and insisted that his project was to write about his childhood in a remote village, not about Syria, much less about the Arab world. “If I had written a book about a village in southern Italy or Norway, would I be asked about my vision of the European world?” he said. “This idea of the Arab world is a mirage, really.” Perhaps it is. Yet that mirage, which Sattouf’s father mistook for the future, is the subject of the memoir. And Sattouf didn’t call the book “The Boy from Ter Maaleh”; he called it “The Arab of the Future.”
The excerpt from the book in the article sold me on it.