37. La Vie Secrète des Jeunes (volumes I, II & III) by Riad Sattouf

There are 3 volumes in total

I'm going to be somewhat ignorantly expository in this post, as I suspect most of the masses of readers will not be aware or able to read these.  I get the sense that among a certain set of Parisian, they were quite impactful at the time.  It was a daily one-page strip in Charlie Hebdo (the satirical magazine that became known outside of France after the horrible attack by some psycho extremists because they dared publish a picture of the prophet) depicting various scenes and incidents that Sattouf (though I wonder if it was just him or if he got anecdotes from other people as well) witnessed and overheard mostly on the streets and metro in Paris.

For the most part, they do not portray the people of Paris kindly.  He got a lot of feedback from readers not believing that the exchanges were real and he swears they all are.  I have to admit that some of the behaviour was quite shocking.  I had heard from some French expats here that it is very hard to be a woman on the street in France and this book bears that out.  There is a lot of really horrific street harassment which--while shit happens here in North America for sure--would just not be acceptable.  Also several straight-up violent attacks.  More common is frank sex talk and cliched Parisian rudeness, like a woman letting her dog shit right in front of somebody.

There is also an interesting theme of the various French people of North African descent. It was quite fascinating to see how Sattouf portrays these people who are often but not alway an underclass in the comics he did much earlier in his career than L'Arabe du Futur.  It helped me to learn a lot of French slang, some of which is common among young Parisians (the verlan, where they flip sylabbles on words so "noir" becomes "reno" which is supposedly a non-perjorative term for Black people) and other specific to those of Arabic descent ("le bled" literally means the village but is used as "back home" or "back in the old country").  Nobody comes off well in this book, but the portrayal of the French Arabs (what is the right way to label them) is particularly rough.  Without any sociopolitical context, it also can be seen at times as stereotyping.  I suspect this editorial stance was not limited to just this cartoon in Charlie Hebdo and that may have also been a factor in the attack.

There are also many frank sexual discussions that are also fascinating (and somewhat shocking as well) to read.  While sex is all over the place everywhere in the west now with the internet, it still seems that at least in the early 2000s, French women were way more sophisticated and sexually liberated than their North American counterparts.  And the men seemed to benefit.

I wouldn't say these are brilliant as they are just single-page strips and the art is kind of deliberately ugly, sort of a more cartoony and smeary Jules Pfeiffer (though the lines getting firmer as his style evolves).  But it is an eye-opening bit of anthropology and quite funny at times.