Ulysses from Bagdad

"My name is Saad Saad, which means in Arabic - hope Hope, as in English-Sad Sad" - so begins "Ulysses from Baghdad" - a new novel by Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt, one of the leading representatives of modern French prose. The hero of the novel, a young man named Saad Saad wants to leave Baghdad, the city where bombings killed his family and fiancée, and to get to Europe, because it would mean freedom and future. But how to cross the border when you log in you will have neither a Dinar?! How to survive in a shipwreck, to elude drug dealers, resist the mesmerizing singing sirens, escape from the Cyclops-the jailer, to be free from witchcraft Sicilian Calypso. So, gradually, step-by turns fierce, tragic and at the same time funny Odyssey of a refugee, one of those hundreds of thousands who were forced to leave their homes.
E.-E. Schmitt - great storyteller - makes the reader spellbound to follow the twists of the plot, reminiscent of the journey of Homer's hero, tales from "one Thousand and one nights; Schmitt - philosopher-humanist forces him to ponder the question about what actually to mankind at the beginning of the third Millennium are the boundaries.