"Ulysse from Bagdad" (Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt)

"My name is Saad Saad, which means Hope Hope in Arabic..."Saad wants to leave the chaos of Baghdad for Europe, freedom and a future. But how do you cross borders without a dinar to call your own? How, like Ulysses, do you brave the storms, survive shipwrecks, evade the opium smugglers, turn a deaf ear to the sirens-turned-rock stars, escape the cruelty of a Cyclopean jailer, or tear yourself away from the amorous enchantment of a Sicilian Calypso?By turns violent, slapstick and tragic, Saad's one-way journey begins. From adventures to tribulations interspersed with conversations with a loving father he can't forget, the novel tells of the exodus of one of the millions of men currently in search of a place on earth: a stowaway. Always a captivating and sympathetic story-teller, Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt offers this picaresque saga for our time and questions the human condition. Are borders the bulwark of our identities, or the last bastion of our illusions?

                                    

Le Soir - « Ulysses in exil »

Schmitt treads in Homer's footsteps to tell a tale that could not be more topical. Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt thrives on myth. His plays and fiction are nourished by the basic legends. On the grounds that the theatre is ideally suited to reworkings of the classic myths, he conjured up Don Juan in Don Juan on Trial and Hamlet in Golden Joe. He even tackled the Scriptures, going so far as shamelessly to entitle the volume that encompasses Night of the Olive Groves and The Bible according to Pilate, My Gospels - what else? In his native French, "Schmitt" rhymes with "myth" and he intends to prove it. He is at it again in his new novel, Ulysses from Baghdad.  This time, fearless as ever, he has taken as his model The Odyssey, the first great travel and adventure novel of our culture. After Mozart, Shakespeare, and Diderot, who has long fascinated Schmitt and whom he knows like the back of his hand, he has looked to Homer for his backdrop - like James Joyce, indeed. Who dares wins.  He has plenty of additional strings to his bow, too, like basing his stories on current events, as he did in his "Cycle de l'invisible" a series of novellas that took the world by storm. There are echoes of Monsieur Ibrahim or Oscar and The Lady in Pink in Ulysses from Baghdad: the same stylization, the same concern for simplicity, the same hint of the essay or exemplary story that invites the reader to supply the moral but refrains from dictating one. (...)Schmitt enjoys a tremendous following (and consequently suffers the disparagement of certain intellectuals), precisely because he believes in the constructive function of art and because of his ability to rouse people while remaining accessible to the masses. It is his wide-ranging culture and his obvious talent that enable him to achieve this. Once again, his success is assured.Jacques de Decker

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