Stay tuned for the finale.
The fourth and penultimate volume in Sattouf’s epic graphic memoir.
With this installment, which follows The Arab of the Future: The Circumcision Years: A Childhood in the Middle East, 1985-1987 (2018), the impressive scope and scale of the series becomes clearer. It has taken three volumes for the author to get to his 10th birthday, and the opening pages of this book find him living with his mother and siblings in her native France while his father pursues his fantasies of wealth, financial independence, and early retirement as a professor in Saudi Arabia. Here, Sattouf’s father seems more determinedly Muslim than ever, convinced that the family’s future lies in the Middle East, where he finds both the morals and the prospects for a future higher. “We’ll live like lords,” he insists. However, the author’s mother remained resistant, seeing a better life for herself and a better education for her children in the West, and specifically in France. Meanwhile, the young Sattouf shuttled between the cultures; he found his father’s religion strange and forgot how to speak his native tongue while immersed in the French school system. On one visit to his father, he was told, “You’re a French kid with an Arab name. You’re not a real Arab.” He also endured homosexual epithets, partly because others found the way he spoke effeminate and partly because of his predilection for drawing—the art that may well provide the key to his identity across cultures. It’s clear this was an awkward time, as early adolescence is for most. During the five years of this narrative, Sattouf will reach his midteens, experience some sexual confusion and awakening, see his hair turn from blond to brown, develop an ungainly body with an oversized head, and go from being “pretty cute” to “the ugliest boy in the class.” Nor can he find any stability outside himself, as the center of his parents’ marriage cannot hold, and international relations find the West and Middle East in mortal combat.
Stay tuned for the finale.Pub Date: Nov. 5, 2019
ISBN: 978-1-250-15066-0
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Metropolitan/Henry Holt
Review Posted Online: June 30, 2019
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 15, 2019
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
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 moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular...
A neurosurgeon with a passion for literature tragically finds his perfect subject after his diagnosis of terminal lung cancer.
Writing isn’t brain surgery, but it’s rare when someone adept at the latter is also so accomplished at the former. Searching for meaning and purpose in his life, Kalanithi pursued a doctorate in literature and had felt certain that he wouldn’t enter the field of medicine, in which his father and other members of his family excelled. “But I couldn’t let go of the question,” he writes, after realizing that his goals “didn’t quite fit in an English department.” “Where did biology, morality, literature and philosophy intersect?” So he decided to set aside his doctoral dissertation and belatedly prepare for medical school, which “would allow me a chance to find answers that are not in books, to find a different sort of sublime, to forge relationships with the suffering, and to keep following the question of what makes human life meaningful, even in the face of death and decay.” The author’s empathy undoubtedly made him an exceptional doctor, and the precision of his prose—as well as the moral purpose underscoring it—suggests that he could have written a good book on any subject he chose. Part of what makes this book so essential is the fact that it was written under a death sentence following the diagnosis that upended his life, just as he was preparing to end his residency and attract offers at the top of his profession. Kalanithi learned he might have 10 years to live or perhaps five. Should he return to neurosurgery (he could and did), or should he write (he also did)? Should he and his wife have a baby? They did, eight months before he died, which was less than two years after the original diagnosis. “The fact of death is unsettling,” he understates. “Yet there is no other way to live.”
A moving meditation on mortality by a gifted writer whose dual perspectives of physician and patient provide a singular clarity.Pub Date: Jan. 19, 2016
ISBN: 978-0-8129-8840-6
Page Count: 248
Publisher: Random House
Review Posted Online: Sept. 29, 2015
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Oct. 15, 2015
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