Carmela Ciuraru. "New Novels by Paul Murray, César Aira and Others". The New York Times . Retrieved 2016-11-02. Abdul-Razak obtains a teaching job in Syria and the family moves to his hometown Teir Maalah, near Homs. Riad encounters severe bullying, in which two cousins accuse him of being Jewish and mercilessly torment him—seemingly because of his blond hair and foreign mother. The cousins' enmity appears to be entangled with a financial dispute between their father and Riad's father. Riad also witnesses strict segregation of genders and sects, media censorship, animal abuse, corruption, poor sanitation, and crippling poverty. Riad befriends Wael and Mohammad, two other cousins who teach him Syrian Arabic; they try to protect him from the two bullies, who are their uncles though around the same age. Riad observes the cult of personality surrounding Hafez al-Assad, who he sees as more sinister than Libya's Gaddafi. Abdul-Razak wants Riad to begin school, but Clémentine fears he is too young—then forbids it entirely after witnessing a group of boys torture and kill a puppy for sport. The Syrian boys Sattouf met were like “little men,” intimidatingly fluent in the rhetoric of warfare. The first Arabic word he learned from them was yehudi, “Jew.” It was hurled at him at a family gathering by two of his cousins, who proceeded to pounce on him. Fighting the Israeli Army was the most popular schoolyard game. The Jew was “a kind of evil creature for us,” Sattouf told me, though no one had actually seen one. (Sattouf writes, “I tried to be the most aggressive one toward the Jews, to prove that I wasn’t one of them.”) Another pastime was killing small animals: the first volume of “The Arab of the Future” concludes with the lynching of a puppy." With Clémentine transcribing his words and "rendering them intelligible," Abdul-Razak obtains a Ph.D. in history from the Sorbonne. In 1980, he moves the family to Libya after accepting a job as an associate professor. (He is paid in US dollars, with the funds sent to an account in the Channel Islands.)

Sattouf is choosing what to tell us about his upbringing with the consciousness of an adult. He shows the peculiarities of early education in France, and Syria. Both have failures, as a system. It’s a wonder we survive at all, but less surprising that we exhibit the flaws we do. He has a finely honed skill for cutting away the extraneous, and revealing the kernel of his experience. He makes it laughable, but at heart, it is also terrifying.

Julia Dumont, « L’Arabe du futur 2: l’enfance syrienne de Riad Sattouf séduit les lecteurs», sur france24.com, 14 juin 2015 (consulté le 28 septembre 2015).

I am reminded of Richard Dawkins’ The God Delusion in which Dawkins writes of early childhood inculcation into any religion as one of the most damaging things that can happen to the impressionable mind. One cannot help but agree when one sees what it has done in cultures all over the world. In this part of the world hatreds last for millennia, perhaps due largely to childhood inculcation. Riad’s father buys him a plastic revolver as a toy. “All boys like weapons,” he says. Does it follow, I wonder, that all who like weapons are still boys? This graphic memoir is set in France, Libya and Syria, and we learn about the childhood of the author and his family as they navigate various cultures, religions, and political landscapes. The author's father is a Sunni Arab who married a French woman, and like many immigrants, he is a contradiction that many people find hard to understand. His father is quite Western and modern in some ways, but also retains much of the values and prejudices he acquired as a child, and like all kids born into cultures not of their parents, the author grapples with these contradictions. Jean-Pierre Filiu, « L'Arabe du futur: Riad Sattouf raconte la Syrie et la Libye de son enfance», Rue89,‎ 29 mai 2014 ( lire en ligne)

Abdul-Razak works as a professor in Syria. Among his students is one of the bodyguards of Hafez al-Assad. Abdul-Razak is torn between his desire to be an enlightened modern man and his loyalty to his conservative family. Clémentine and the children travel to Brittany for her to give birth to her third child, Fadi. After they return to Syria, Abdul-Razak has made his peace with his family. He agrees to have Riad circumcised. At the end of the book, he announces that he will begin a new job in Saudi Arabia. Sonia Déchamp, « La véritable épopée de l' Arabe du futur», Les Cahiers de la bande dessinée, n o5,‎ octobre-décembre 2018, p.126-129 La réception critique dans le monde est excellente [15 ]: le tome 2 est élu «roman graphique du mois» par le journal anglais The Guardian [16 ] et le New York Times le qualifie d' «artistiquement exceptionnel» [17 ]. Los Angeles Book Prizes 2015 dans la catégorie Graphic Novel/comics [22 ] , [23 ] pour la version américaine ( The Arab of the Future: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1978-1984: A Graphic Memoir)

Il se base principalement sur ses souvenirs, et cela explique les références régulières aux odeurs et le point de vue enfantin [5 ]. Le tome 2 mentionnait des éditions en 15 langues: français, allemand, anglais, brésilien, catalan, coréen, danois, espagnol, finnois, italien, néerlandais, norvégien, polonais, portugais et suédois.Sattouf doesn’t do anything particularly special with his style of storytelling, either literally or visually, he just tells it straightforwardly but he does it so well. He’s a natural storyteller who’s perfectly suited to the comics medium and that makes reading this such a joy. In striking, virtuoso graphic style that captures both the immediacy of childhood and the fervor of political idealism, Riad Sattouf recounts his nomadic childhood growing up in rural France, Gaddafi's Libya, and Assad's Syria--but always under the roof of his father, a Syrian Pan-Arabist who drags his family along in his pursuit of grandiose dreams for the Arab nation. L'Arabe du futur est une série de bande dessinée autobiographique de Riad Sattouf créée en 2014 et publiée par Allary Éditions. La série compte 6 tomes. Frédéric Potet, « «L’Arabe du futur» de Riad Sattouf: autopsie d’un succès», Le Monde, 30 juin 2015 Stéphane Jarno, « L'Arabe du futur vole de succès en succès», Télérama,‎ 7 octobre 2016 ( lire en ligne, consulté le 8 octobre 2016)