"My name is Saad Saad, which in Arabic means Hope Hope, and in English Sad Sad"—that’s how “Ulysses from Baghdad” begins, E.E. Schmitt’s novel by one of the largest representatives of modern French prose. The hero of the novel, a young man named Saad Saad, wants to leave Baghdad—the city where under bombings his relatives and fiancée died—and reach Europe, which for him means freedom and a future. But how to cross borders if you don’t have a dinar in your pocket?! How to survive a shipwreck, slip past drug dealers, withstand the enchanting singing of sirens, escape a Cyclops jailer, free oneself from the spell of the Sicilian Calypso. Thus, step by step, a cruel, tragic and at the same time amusing odyssey of a refugee unfolds—one of those hundreds of thousands who were forced to leave their home places.