Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi
Hardcover - 2 volumes, Parthenon
I have decided to allow the inclusion of a graphic novel into my 50 books count this year. Everyone is always saying how the graphic novel should be getting the respect that 'regular' literature gets and I am all for that.
Persepolis is the memoir of a young Iranian woman and tells the tale of her life growing up through the tumultuous 1970's and 1980's. Her parents are relatively secular and the first part of the book takes place in a background of the growing discontent with the Shah and his eventual overthrow in 1979. Many of her family are arrested and we see the tightening of freedoms as fundamentalist thought comes to the fore. In the next section of the book, the author is in school however the Iran-Iraq war rages in the background. This seems to cement the new regimes fundamentalist rules and both the author and her parents chafe against these restrictions. Eventually her parents send her off to attend high school in Austria.
Satrapi reinvents herself in Austria and does her best to forget her past. She embraces all things 'western': drugs, boyfriends, anarchist thought. Ultimately, nothing really makes her happy and she falls into a period of strong depression. At this point she decides to return to Iran to be with her family. Eventually there is a gradual finding of herself and she finds a man with whom she marries. In the end, she leaves the country and moves to France.
I found this to be a cool story especially about the day to day life of someone who lived through the Revolution.
4 comments:
The silence is broken! I've been wondering why the blogging has been so quiet over the past month and now I know - you're holding back to keep us guessing about your real progress!
All four books seem very interesting, particularly the Innes.
As an aside, Satrapi was commissioned to write a series of cartoon editorials for the NYT a while ago. She wrote a handful and they were suddenly pulled. The reason is that some of them dealt with smoking and the NYT got a lot of complaints and they canceled her contract.
I check your blog about once every couple of days and until today it had shown the latest update as the entry about the Mandrill, which is why I made the comment about breaking the silence.
I had a bunch of books backlogged that I needed to write the reviews to and I am only just catching up on them.
Stay tuned!
But why does it say that you posted in on October 10th?
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