Riad Sattouf talks to us about volume 5 of “Esther's Notebooks. Stories of my 14th birthday »

Text by: Sophie Torlotin Follow

Her name is Esther and enters 4th grade in a Parisian college. The designer Riad Sattouf tells each week in a board in the weekly L'Obs the daily life of this young girl of her time. This Thursday, June 11, appears volume 5 of Esther's Notebooks.

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Riad Sattouf began to sketch this daughter of friends when she was 9 years old, and publishes, each spring, in one volume, the album of the past year. The first four volumes have already been sold in more than 650,000 copies and translated into several languages ​​(English, German, Korean, Spanish, Greek, Italian, Portuguese, Serbian). Interview.

RFI : Esther is growing up, she is now a full-time teenager.

Riad Sattouf : It is true that she is 14 years old. She is assailed by her hormones in the sense that she is a little soft, less talkative than in the past, so it's very funny to observe. And she changes a lot, because she is interested in the outside world, (begins) to be sensitive to injustices, to have a beginning of political conscience.

In this album, she talks a lot about the environment, anti-racism and feminism. Are these themes that concern her, like her generation ?

Regarding the board on Greta Thunberg [ the Swedish teenager who launched a global school strike movement to denounce the inaction of governments in the face of global warming, note ], it is above all me who launches it on these subjects. It is interesting to see how a young girl like her, without history, fits into these movements that we would like to imagine universal.

The first time I told her about Greta Thunberg, she didn't know her, she thought she was a candidate for The Voice  ! Afterwards, she remembered that it was a young girl who was on strike at school, but in Esther's college no one went on strike for the climate.

She is confronted with sexism in her school, so all questions of feminism, of fight against male domination, are very present in her. More than the fight for the environment. But what interests me is to have his point of view on current events.

When the series started, she was 9 years old. There, she has 15. She feels no weariness at being followed, sketched, week after week in L'Obs  ?

I do not think so. When she was little, she was very talkative, now she is less, she thinks more about what she means. Afterwards, it is not intensive work. She regularly sends me SMS or MMS to tell me an anecdote and I make a comic book page afterwards. I have the impression that we will succeed in reaching our 18th birthday. When she was younger she was not very interested in comics. And now that the comic strip has been successful, it has happened that people offer her The Notebooks of Esther, without knowing that she is the real Esther, on her birthday for example. It fascinates her, she is taken aback to be part of the success.

The singer Angèle retweeted a comic strip on her Instagram account, and it's dizzying for her! And at the same time her character is different from her, because I don't want anyone to be able to recognize her.

There are first loves, and the more she grows, the question of her intimacy is likely to arise.

The project of Esther's Notebooks is not to restore a diary. I'm not trying to talk about his love life. I tell what she wants to tell me about. If she doesn't broach the subject of her love life, I'm not going to talk about it. What interests me is her way of seeing things and what she wants to tell me about the world.

Do Esther's Notebooks meet the same international success as in France ?

It is true that there are many references to French politics or culture in this comic strip, and yet it is successful elsewhere than in France. In Spain, for example, it sells well. There are undoubtedly universal questions and then there are few comics with young heroines, so Les Cahiers d'Esther speaks to young readers.

►  Riad Sattouf: Les Cahiers d'Esther , tome 5, Histoires de mes 14 ans , graphic novel, 56 pages, Allary editions.

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