A couple of years later, after the birth of Sattouf’s brother, Abdel-Razak got a job teaching in Damascus, and moved the family to Ter Maaleh, the village where he’d grown up. Austere and piously Sunni, Ter Maaleh proved even more trying than Libya. The streets smelled of human excrement. Sexual segregation was rigorously observed. At family gatherings, the women cooked for the men, and waited to eat whatever morsels were left. Everywhere you looked, the eyes of the President stared down at you from billboards and posters.

During these years, Sattouf would return to France each summer, spending it with his mother’s family in Brittany. In “The Arab of the Future,” Sattouf represents the three countries in which he grew up with washes of color: gray-blue for France, yellow for Libya, a pinkish red for Syria. These washes—“colors of emotion,” Sattouf calls them—create a powerfully claustrophobic effect, as if each country were its own sealed-off environment. A rough draftsman, Sattouf relies on simplification, exaggeration, and other scrappy effects, in the way that a newspaper cartoonist might. He draws his figures in black-and-white, and distills their features in a few expressive gestures: enormous noses, dots for eyes, single lines for eyebrows. It is not a sumptuous visual style, but it is an effective one, particularly in its evocation of the way in which a child sees the world. Sattouf has cited Hergé as one of his primary influences, but his sensibility is closer to “South Park” than to “Tintin.”

“The Arab of the Future” immerses the reader in the sensory impressions of childhood, particularly its smells. Little Riad uses his nose to navigate his worlds, Arab and French, and to find his place in them. He identifies his relatives by their smell: the sweat of his Syrian grandmother, which he prefers to the perfume of his French grandmother; the “sour smell” of his maternal grandfather. “When I started to remember this period, I realized that many of my memories were of sounds and smells,” Sattouf told me. “I remembered that every woman I knew in the village had a very different odor. And the people whose odor I preferred were generally the ones who were the kindest to me. I find that’s still true today.”

“She’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. She’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. She’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses, she’ll be driving six white horses when she comes. I can’t compete with that.” Facebook

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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.

Ter Maaleh was Abdel-Razak’s home, but he hadn’t been back in seventeen years, and he was nearly as much of a stranger there as his wife, the only woman in the village who didn’t cover herself. His older brother, who never expected him to return, had sold much of his land. Abdel-Razak tried to ingratiate himself with more powerful men, like his cousin, a general in the Syrian Army. He had little affection for the regime, and even less for the Alawite minority that dominated it, but he was desperate to improve his fortunes. “My father was a collaborator,” Sattouf says. “I think what he liked about Assad was that he had come from a very poor background and ended up ruling over other people. Assad had a destiny, and my father thought that he might, too. He was completely fascinated by power.”

Much of the pathos of the memoir comes from Sattouf’s depiction of his father, a dreamer full of bluster, driven by impotent fury at the West; a secularist who can’t quite free himself from superstition; a man who wants to give orders but whose lot is to follow them. He is embarrassed by his son’s vulnerability, which reminds him of his own; he proclaims himself the master of the household but usually defers to his more practical wife. For all his rants against Jews, Africans, and, above all, the Shia, he remains strangely endearing, a kind of Arab Archie Bunker. The great drama of the book lies less in Riad’s adventures than in his father’s gradual surrender to local traditions.

One of those traditions was honor killing. When Sattouf was seven, a cousin of his, a thirty-five-year-old widow who taught him to draw, was suffocated to death by her father and her brother, who had discovered that she was pregnant. In the second volume of “The Arab of the Future,” little Riad learns of her death while eavesdropping on a conversation between his parents. Clémentine is aghast at the murder, while Abdel-Razak tries to have it both ways: Yes, he says, honor crimes are “terrible,” but in rural Syria becoming pregnant outside marriage “is the worst dishonor that a girl can bring upon her family.” Clémentine pressures Abdel-Razak to report the crime, and the men are imprisoned. But only a few months later the couple pass one of them on the street. Clémentine is shocked, and her husband reveals that the sentence was commuted as part of a deal between the authorities and the family. People in the village, he says, were “beginning to say the Sattoufs were weak” because they had sent to prison “a man who had done nothing but preserve the honor of his family.” We see him turning away from his wife, his hands clasped behind his back. In “The Arab of the Future,” his accommodation is nearly as heartbreaking as the killing itself.

In 1990, Abdel-Razak and Clémentine separated. Clémentine took her sons to live in Brittany. Sattouf and his father exchanged letters, but he says that “the rupture was total.” Clémentine eventually found work as a medical secretary, but for several years she was unemployed, and the family lived on welfare in public housing. Sattouf says he felt no less out of place in school in France—and scarcely less bullied—than he had in Syria. His blond hair turned black and curly, and, he recalled, “I went from being an elf to a troll. I was voted the ugliest person in class.” Accused of being a Jew in Syria, he was now gay-baited because of his high voice. “Those experiences gave me an immense affection for Jews and gays,” he said.

Then there was his name. In Arabic, the names Riad and Sattouf had what he described as “an impressive solemnity.” In French, they sounded like rire de sa touffe, which means “laugh at her pussy.” When teachers took attendance, “people would burst out laughing. It was impossible for a girl to date a guy whose name meant ‘I laughed at your pussy.’ ” As a result, he said, “I lived a very violent solitude. This is something a lot of illustrators have in common.”

For our first meeting, Sattouf proposed that I come to a café near his apartment, not far from the Place de la République, where he lives with his partner—a comic-book editor—and their son. When he saw me waiting for him outside the café, he said, “What, you didn’t enter? Let’s enter! I can’t believe it, I am speaking English!” Sattouf immediately shifted to French; he reserves English—to be precise, a caricature of American-accented English—for jokes and impersonations, as if it were intrinsically humorous.

After coffee, we walked over to Sattouf’s apartment so that I could see his studio. He draws at his desk on Photoshop, facing a wall of bookshelves stacked with comic books and works on Paris photography by Atget and Doisneau. There was an old photograph of the Italian actress Valeria Golino, whom he cast in “Les Beaux Gosses,” a hit movie about a provincial high school that he made a few years ago. (“I used to masturbate a lot thinking of her when I was a teen-ager,” he volunteered.) In the living room, there were framed drawings by his favorite cartoonists—Chris Ware, Richard Corben, and Robert Crumb, among others—and a collection of electric guitars. By the window stood a pot with three cacti: two short, one long, in the shape of a penis and testicles, a gift from his friend the actor Vincent Lacoste, the star of “Les Beaux Gosses.” Sattouf said he had been reading Chateaubriand but that he mostly reads comic books. The only book about the Middle East that I could see was one on Islam by Bernard Lewis. It was still in shrink-wrap.