Review by New York Times Review
"IF I locked you up, it was so you could taste hate," Dr. Amin Jaafari's captor says in the extraordinary graphic novel version of Yasmina Kadra's "The Attack." "Anything can happen if you scratch at someone's self-esteem. Especially if they are feeling powerless." This is not just a simplified explanation of the complex motivations of a suicide bomber. These words, in a sense, exemplify the brutal cycle of the Middle East tragedy: Injustice leads to powerlessness, to frustration to rage, and finally to acts of violence that undercut any attempts at peace or reconciliation. Except this time, Dr. Amin - an Israeli Arab surgeon whose wife, Sihem, mysteriously disappears down the rabbit hole of radical extremism and violence - is being held in a darkened room by Palestinian radicals in the West Bank city of Jenin, not by the Shin Bet, the Israeli Security Agency. He has embarked on a quest across the Occupied Territories to try to unravel how and why his wife blew herself up along with innocent bystanders on a crowded Tel Aviv street. His voyage into the abyss starts in the emergency room at the hospital where he works, desperately trying to save victims of a suicide bomber, before discovering through Israeli friends that it was his wife who in fact murdered and harmed all these people. The genius of "The Attack" is that while you are led, Odysseus-like, through the back streets and alleys of Bethlehem and Jenin, meeting radicals and thugs, families who have turned violent out of deep resentment and frustration, people whose homes are bulldozed by Israeli soldiers, you are following Amin's inner journey in real time. You are also descending into the rabbit hole. What incident prompted Sihem to turn from a wife, beautiful and bright, into a killer? How did Amin lose his own Arab identity by closing himself off to the tragedy of those living in Gaza and Jenin while he pursued a secular, noninvasive life, safely cocooned in his hospital? Or, as one of the radicals tells him, "Now . . . you have experienced a bit of the horrors that your job has protected you from." There is no grand finale, no morality play, no lessons learned on the IsraeliPalestinian conflict in these pages. There is, in fact, no judgment of who is wrong and who is right. There is just the deep sense of loss, horror, bereavement and finally, shock. "I have no intention of . . . taking down the group," Amin says to his best friend, Kim, a Jewish surgeon, of his quest to find out who indoctrinated Sihem. "I just want to know how the love of my life excluded me from hers." "The Attack" is not even the story of how radicals take up arms, or why Sihem strapped on that explosive vest - was it out of love for another man, or was it her own true calling? "The Attack," ultimately, is a story of lost innocence. On one of his endless wanderings, this time through an olive grove near Bethlehem, Amin meets an old Jewish man, a friend of his father's. "All Palestinian Jews are a bit Arab and Israeli Arabs cannot deny being a little bit Jewish," he muses. The old man agrees with him, but asks: "So why is there so much hate in the same lineage?" RIAD SATTOUF, A former contributor to the French satirical magazine Charlie Hebdo, which sustained a terrorist attack in 2015 leaving 12 people dead, wrote "The Arab of the Future" first in French in 2014. The story, of a half-Syrian, half-French kid growing up in Libya in the strange, dark days of Qaddafi's rule from 1978 to 1984, was an instant success in France. He has come back with Part 2, which picks up in 1984. By now, the Sattouf family has returned to Ter Maaleh, Syria, the paternal village in the Homs countryside. The father, Abdel-Razak, an unappetizing bully from Page 1, teaches at a local university. He bemoans his lack of stature and money, and the fact that his sleazier relatives closer to the Assad regime have better sunglasses, houses and cars. He fantasizes about the vast garish villa he will soon build, but never does. The mother, Clémentine, a depressed Frenchwoman in exile, yearns for saucisson in a Muslim culture that bans pork. She tries to span the cultural gap, cooking pots of lentils over a portable stove, weaving a tapestry that she never completes and yearning for a washing machine or a generator. "Are you crazy?" her husband screeches. "It is forbidden! If someone reported us, I could go to prison!" "You're just saying that because it's expensive," she retorts. In between are their baffled children - 6-year-old Riad and his tiny brother, nicknamed Yahya. Riad has trouble sleeping. He tries to play with his Legos from France, but the children's games he plays with his cousins always involve killing Jews. The cultural shift from his previous life in France, or even the oddity of Libya, is a divide he finds too hard to traverse. Why are the teachers so brutal, beating children with sticks while teaching them patriotic songs? Why are they taught never to criticize Hafez Assad or his family? And why are people so afraid? The teacher is intrigued by his blond hair. "Tell me, what is your religion?" she asks him. "Are both your parents Syrian?" The question, of course, is does he have any Jewish blood. This volume of Sattouf's graphic memoir is more than just a coming-of-age story. It is a window into life under the Assads in a time of the Hama massacre, where thousands of Sunni men were butchered. It ends with a village tragedy, but one that could be a metaphor for the tragedy of Syria. LESS POIGNANT BUT impressive in its own naïve way is "Rolling Blackouts: Dispatches From Turkey, Syria, and Iraq," by Sarah Glidden. Glidden is a West Coast cartoonist who teams up with a gang of independent reporters to traverse the war-torn Middle East. Ethics aside - is this war tourism? - there is something heady about Glidden's learning curve. "It's so weird for me to come to places where you just can't talk about certain things," one of her friends muses. "Because people just spout their mouths off left and right in America about any damned thing they want to." Her two-month voyage is a Middle East 101, a kind of "Let's Go: Middle East for Millennials." It's a child's vision, a comic book about statistics and data of refugees in Turkey; the Kurdish question; the lingering damage of the Iraq invasion told through the eyes of her fellow traveler, a former Marine called Dan who has obvious but vital observations like: "What would be best for our foreign policy would be if we moved away from all the military stuff and started programs that would help these people." It's hard not to utter to oneself, "Duh," as Glidden gradually takes on the multilayered complexities of the Middle East. But there is something fresh in her narrative. In the midst of her cultural wanderings - the endless cups of heavily sugared tea and the bewilderment she constantly feels - Glidden pieces together something that newspaper reporters often miss while trying so hard to analyze. By talking to people and living their lives, she unearths very real people and their real stories. ? JANINE DI GIOVANNI is the Middle East editor of Newsweek and the author, most recently, of "The Morning They Came for Us: Dispatches From Syria."
Copyright (c) The New York Times Company [January 1, 2017]
Review by Booklist Review
French cartoonist and film director Sattouf grew up mostly in Libya and Syria, and this memoir recounts his peripatetic childhood. His mother, a student from Brittany, met his Syrian father at university in Paris. Shortly after Sattouf's birth, his father took an academic position in Tripoli, where he hoped to promote his grandiose vision of pan-Arabism; instead, the family struggled to navigate a dysfunctional society under the thrall of Gaddafi. After a brief retreat to France, they resettle in his father's village in Syria, where the casual cruelty of the children in one grueling scene, they play soccer with a puppy mirrors the brutality of the Hafez al-Assad regime. Sattouf relates the harrowing events of his youth, in particular, the megalomaniacal behavior of his father, with a clear-eyed detachment and in a straightforward, if cartoonish, drawing style, which makes his account all the more distressing. Although his works have been translated in 15 languages, this is his first appearance in English. Expect it to receive the same acclaim here that it already has worldwide.--Flagg, Gordon Copyright 2015 Booklist
From Booklist, Copyright (c) American Library Association. Used with permission.
Review by Publisher's Weekly Review
This first part of former Charlie Hebdo columnist Sattouf's autobiography was a controversial bestseller in France. It follows his early childhood through stints in France, Libya, and Syria, and his cross-cultural alienation from all of them. Sattouf's father is Syrian, his mother French, and his story recounts the way his father commandeered their family life to reconcile himself with his Arab heritage. Though he is often forced back to France, Sattouf's father takes teaching jobs in dictator-run Arab countries, then works to convince himself, and his family, that their near-utopian dreams are close to coming true. But through the author's young eyes these regimes are revealed for all their weirdnesses and hardships. Despite his father's determination to integrate his son into Arab society, little Sattouf-with his long blond hair-never fully fits in, and this report reads like the curious pondering of an alien from another world. Caught between his parents, Sattouf makes the best of his situation by becoming a master observer and interpreter, his clean, cartoonish art making a social and personal document of wit and understanding. Agent: Marleen Seegers (Oct.) © Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved.
(c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Review by Library Journal Review
When Riad's Syrian father shows his son how to draw a Mercedes, he insists that the wheels are rectangular-one of many disjunctures between dogma and reality observed by the small child. Although Riad is born in France to a French mother, the family relocates to Muammar Gaddafi's Libya and then Bashar al-Assad's Syria, where despite idealistic propaganda, buildings crumble, food is scarce, squatters displace residents, trash and human waste are everywhere, and his father's dreams for pan-Arab sovereignty are obviously delusionary. Public cruelty dominates daily life: his cousins attack him, children torture puppies, hanged criminals dangle in public, and women eat the men's leftovers. Yet filmmaker/cartoonist Sattouf (Pascal -Brutal) remembers fondly the smell of sweat and the taste of Syrian foods. His blobby characters and pastel halftones contrast ironically with the sometimes-grim content. VERDICT This snapshot of Middle Eastern countries in perpetual unease bears witness to the complexities of cultural conflict as well as the resilience of people just trying to live, perhaps coping by accepting misinformation simply to keep up hope. A solid read for students of culture clash and international affairs, high school and up.-M.C. © Copyright 2015. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by School Library Journal Review
Gr 10 Up-Sattouf recreates his childhood in France, Libya, and Syria with a French mother and a Sunni father. The narrative is honest and wandering, with insights coming from the portrayal of his proud, temperamental father's views on politics and Arab life. The stark colors and drawings emphasize a childish perspective and provide an uncensored look at a complex world. © Copyright 2016. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
(c) Copyright Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.
Review by Kirkus Book Review
A child's-eye view of upheaval in the Arab world and its relations with the West. The first work by the acclaimed French cartoonist and filmmaker to be published in English is sure to extend his renown. "My name is Riad," writes Sattouf on the first page. "In 1980, I was two years old and I was perfect." However, such perfection came at a cost for the blond-haired, bright-eyed, delicately featured protagonist, particularly after his family left his mother's native France to further his academic father's vision of "pan-Arabism. He was obsessed with education for the Arabs. He thought that Arab men had to educate themselves to escape from religious dogma." Yet there was no escape from religious dogma, political repression, or rootless poverty. The author chronicles his father's spurning of an appointment from Oxford because "they misspelled my name in the letter" for one that moved the family to Libya, where dreams of equality came at a price, since squattership seemed to trump ownership where living quarters were concerned. Though a return to France would have been welcome, the father moved the family to his native Syria, which was not what he remembered or envisioned, where the son found the morning call to prayer to be "the saddest voice in the world." It appears through the narrator's innocent eyes that much of the adult world was seriously out of touch with reality, though he felt even more threatened by his peers and relations, who made fun of his "ugly yellow Jewish hair." Somehow, the narrative is both very funny and very sad, though the fact that this book even exists shows that a boy's artistic gifts were finally permitted to flourish. Sattouf has also worked as a columnist for the satirical Charlie Hebdo, but the social commentary here is more wistful and melancholy than sharp-edged. This first volume of a memoir "to be continued" is subtly written and deftly illustrated, with psychological incisiveness and humor. Copyright Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
