European Graphic Novels++

Sometime back I decided to read this series of six tomes rather leisurely, so as to hopefully savor it a bit more fully. Well, as of today I just finished T2, and boy... was it worth the wait. oO

The author is Riad Sattouf, a talented & successful French-Syrian cartoonist who created this autobiographical series in order to tell the tale of his childhood years. This here volume is set in 1985, in which he would have been about 7yo, just entering public school.

Here, Riad is currently living in a Syrian village, during the period of Hafez al-Assad's dictatorship, reflected rather bleakly in his early school career. For example, in which its debatable whether his merciless Syrian-Muslim teacher is more or less terrifying than the various, merciless Catholic nuns back in France.

Now, these pages specifically happen to serve as excerpts from Riad's school experiences, but to be clear-- the overall tome does a great job portraying what life was like for him across all phases, including a focus on his parents, his family & neighbors, and what it was like going back to visiting France during the summers, highlighting a certain bleak economic divide.

Oh man, Sattouf really does amaze me. I mean, even tho I've previously read a handful of Middle-Eastern-locale and themed BD's, I'd seen nothing like this before, except for maybe the breakthrough "Aya de Yopougon" series, that one set in the Ivory Coast, of course.

So what was so different in 'Arab?' Err... well, first of all, it's told from a shy young child's POV undergoing a certain amount of culture-shock, but one who also has a major gift for noticing all kinds of details around him, such as personal and cultural. That, then, is probably the key entryway by which just about any reader should be able to enjoy these books, and say something like 'gorsh, this is both curious and even hilarious, at turns!'

The fact is, it's hard to properly describe just how excellent this series is.

In one way, it's a bit like being 'Huck and Jim', leisurely floating down a small arm of the Mississippi, taking passing delight in all the little sights, sounds and species discovered along the way. OTOH, it's full of small shocks, novel mysteries, and random dangers to little Riad, and by extension, to the reader.

It really cannot be understated how masterfully efficient a storyteller Sattouf is, especially doing so with such a level of smooth, 'eyes-open' kind of grace.