"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?
Argentina, in the middle fifties. Sulamit is the daughter of German-Jewish refugees. Friedrich is the son of German-Nazis refugees. Both children are closely friends as times goes by between the fall of Peron's Government in 1955 and the years of prison, torture and death in Argentina since 1976 to 1983. The children grow up and go to Germany, both get involved in the political struggles of 1968 and Friedrich, who always rejected the Nazi past of his father, becomes a left winged militant and decides to come back to Argentina to fight against the Military Government. The love of Sulamit for Friedrich survives all these years, though he dedicates more time to his political commitments than to his personal feelings. But those two are destined to get together after all these years of separation and disagreements, because their love is more powerful than anything else.
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