The award-winning French-Syrian comic artist’s new books are set to be hugely successful, though they have have been criticised for reinforcing Arab stereotypes. But their author is more complex than that

“The success makes me very happy, I never thought it would go this far,” says French graphic novelist and film-maker Riad Sattouf, referring to his autobiography-in-progress, The Arab of the Future.

Recently published in French, the first two volumes of Sattouf’s four-part graphic novel memoirs, about his childhood in Libya and Syria, have been resounding bestsellers and are now poised to become a global phenomenon, translated into 15 languages. The first volume is published in the US this month and was heralded by a New Yorker profile.

Yet Sattouf, 37, was already well known in France, winning prizes both for his graphic novels and his movie Les Beaux Gosses (The French Kissers), which won a César for best first film. Little of his work to date has been autobiographical. “I wanted, as a personal challenge, and I think I managed, to make comics and films without talking about my identity,” he says.

Sattouf’s work is laced with astute observations of human beings. His memoirs often dwell on their failings: hypocrisy, cowardice, bullying. Yet there’s humour too – mainly because his humans are so helplessly absurd.

Inevitably, his success has been seen in the context of France’s current uneasy relationship with its Muslim population: he contributed to Charlie Hebdo for a decade, though he left several months before the terrorist attack on its offices. “Sattouf has achieved prominence as a cartoonist of Muslim heritage at a time when French anxieties about Islam have never been higher and when cartooning has become an increasingly dangerous trade,” writes Adam Shatz in the New Yorker.

However, Sattouf shies away from being regarded as an authority on the Middle East. “It’s inevitable that people ask me my opinion,” he says. “I knew Syria in the 1980s but I can’t say I know anything about Syria today. I’m no more informed about the situation in the Middle East than the average person who watches TV.” In fact, Sattouf recently told the German magazine ExBerliner that he felt neither Syrian nor French, but rather belonged to a global community of comic book authors.

Riad Sattouf (@RiadSattouf) And here is the beautiful U.S. edition of "THE ARAB OF THE FUTURE", available in bookstores now! Thanks @HenryHolt pic.twitter.com/6y4w8GgdXZ

The title of Sattouf’s memoirs refers to his father’s faith that Arab nationalism would modernise the region. Born in Paris in 1978, Sattouf lived first in Libya, where his father had a job as a professor, and then in his father’s hometown in Syria, a village called Ter Maaleh. His parents divorced when he was 11, and his French mother brought Sattouf and his brother back to Rennes, in Brittany. After that, Sattouf, who says he was a solitary adolescent, was focused on surviving school and his memories of Ter Maaleh receded into the distance.

But the Arab world did pop up in his work, first in the character of Jérémie, a lovesick young nerd who is half Libyan, in a three-volume series Les Pauvres Aventures de Jérémie and then in the powerful and “100% autobiographical” 2004 YA illustrated book My Circumcision.

“It was the foreskin, it was the first draft of The Arab of the Future,” smiles Sattouf. As the title suggests, it describes Sattouf’s circumcision at the late age of eight and established many of the elements in the first two volumes of The Arab of the Future: the poverty, ignorance, antisemitism and institutionalised corporal punishment that marked his schooldays in Libya and Syria.

Sattouf has since bought back the rights to My Circumcision, hoping to make the book “disappear” so that when he uses the material in the next volume of his memoirs it will have more impact. The Arab of the Future has revised many of the earlier book’s elements, most notably Sattouf’s portrait of his father. Seeing him through the eyes of a child but with the hindsight of an adult, Sattouf tracks the aspirations of a man who slipped backward instead of forwards, reverting to tradition rather than moving towards the evolution he had hoped for.

After returning to France, Sattouf went some 14 years without seeing his father. Any future contact between father and son will be revealed in subsequent Arab of the Future volumes, he says. The book was sparked by more recent events, like the 2011 uprisings in Syria and Sattouf’s battles with the French administration to help his Syrian family come to France. But, he says, “I realised that in order to write about this, I had to go back to the beginning.”

Some French academics have been critical, saying that The Arab of the Future “unfortunately, ultimately serves to reinforce [negative] stereotypes” of Arabs. But Sattouf is as blunt about the French children in a kindergarten in Brittany that he briefly attended as he is about the goings-on in Ter Maaleh.

“Kids in France seemed dim to me,” he says. “They were overprotected, excluded from confronting reality. The children in Syria and Libya were left to their own devices and were far more autonomous. There was a great difference in maturity.”

As for Ter Maaleh, which he has been accused of depicting as almost medieval, Sattouf says, “It was a rural life, similar to what people lived in France at the beginning of the 20th century. My grandmother’s neighbour in Brittany used to put kittens in a bag and beat them to death to get rid of them.” Another Brittany neighbour, depicted in Vol 1, lived without electricity or water. “If anthropologists had studied her way of life they would have known how people lived in the Middle Ages,” says Sattouf. “You can see what remains of this life in France in Raymond Depardon’s documentary series Profils Paysans [Peasant Profiles]. There’s no specificity about Syria.”

The brutality of schools, he also believes, is universal. “If you watch François Truffaut’s The 400 Blows, it was very similar,” Sattouf said. “It’s the society that changes with the socio-economic level.”

He is currently working on the final two volumes of The Arab of the Future, which he says will include scathing descriptions of foreigners taking on the French administrative system as well as “the reactions of my family to my memoirs”.

There’s also a comic strip called Cahiers d’Esther under construction: a first collection will be published in France in January 2016. “I’m following the daughter of a friend of mine from age 10 to 18,” Sattouf said. “I’d like to see the evolution of how she thinks, how she sees the world. I asked her if she had heard about migrants for example – she hadn’t – and I thought it was interesting to know when it is that you become aware of something like that. She is still dreaming about princesses but in adolescence she’ll find out about the brutality of life.”