Riad Sattouf’s saga of his parents’ failed bicultural marriage, with its harsh depiction of life in rural Syria, has become a literary sensation.
One early evening in December, the Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad fled his country as rebel forces advanced on Damascus. In France, three days later, one of the country’s most-watched TV news channels turned to a cartoonist for expert opinion on the news.
“Did you think that this could have happened so rapidly?” a news anchor for the channel, BFMTV, asked the cartoonist, Riad Sattouf, whose smiling face appeared on a giant video wall.
Over the past decade, Mr. Sattouf, 46, has become one of France’s biggest literary stars, thanks largely to his masterwork, “The Arab of the Future,” a series of graphic memoirs. Over six volumes, the series tells the story of Mr. Sattouf’s childhood, which was jarringly divided between the Middle East and France, and the disintegration of the marriage between his French mother and his Syrian father.
The books — in a genre known as “bandes dessinées” in France — have sold more than three million copies and have been translated into some 23 languages. Though told from a child’s perspective and drawn in a deceptively simple style, they touch on some of the thorniest questions about the compatibility of the Western and Arab worlds. They are also suffused with a subtle but withering social satire.
For Mr. Sattouf, this posture informs not only his art, but the way he interprets the world. In his TV appearance in December, he told viewers that the fall of Mr. al-Assad was a moment of “immense hope” for Syria. But when asked to predict what might happen next, he warned that he tended to see things “extremely pessimistically.”
“I keep my fingers crossed,” he said, “that a terrible dictatorship won’t be replaced by another dictatorship.”