Sattouf has also worked as a columnist for the satirical Charlie Hebdo, but the social commentary here is more wistful and...
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.Pub Date: Oct. 13, 2015
ISBN: 978-1-62779-344-5
Page Count: 160
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 27, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2015
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
PERSPECTIVES
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
A wonderful page-turner written with humility, immediacy, and great style. Nothing came cheap and easy to McCandless, nor...
The excruciating story of a young man on a quest for knowledge and experience, a search that eventually cooked his goose, told with the flair of a seasoned investigative reporter by Outside magazine contributing editor Krakauer (Eiger Dreams, 1990).
Chris McCandless loved the road, the unadorned life, the Tolstoyan call to asceticism. After graduating college, he took off on another of his long destinationless journeys, this time cutting all contact with his family and changing his name to Alex Supertramp. He was a gent of strong opinions, and he shared them with those he met: "You must lose your inclination for monotonous security and adopt a helter-skelter style of life''; "be nomadic.'' Ultimately, in 1992, his terms got him into mortal trouble when he ran up against something—the Alaskan wild—that didn't give a hoot about Supertramp's worldview; his decomposed corpse was found 16 weeks after he entered the bush. Many people felt McCandless was just a hubris-laden jerk with a death wish (he had discarded his map before going into the wild and brought no food but a bag of rice). Krakauer thought not. Admitting an interest that bordered on obsession, he dug deep into McCandless's life. He found a willful, reckless, moody boyhood; an ugly little secret that sundered the relationship between father and son; a moral absolutism that agitated the young man's soul and drove him to extremes; but he was no more a nutcase than other pilgrims. Writing in supple, electric prose, Krakauer tries to make sense of McCandless (while scrupulously avoiding off-the-rack psychoanalysis): his risky behavior and the rites associated with it, his asceticism, his love of wide open spaces, the flights of his soul.
Pub Date: Jan. 1, 1996
ISBN: 0-679-42850-X
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Villard
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 1995
SEEN & HEARD
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