Setting the Bar

As most of you know, I finished Persepolis last week. Persepolis 2 picks up where Ms. Marjane Satrapi left off in her previous autobiographical graphic novel. In this novel, we meet Marji in Vienna, Austria, where she is attending a French school and living on her own, separated from her parents who are still in war-torn Tehran. As she tries to integrated into Western culture, specifically Austrian culture in the eighties, she experiences a loss of identity.  She remains fiercely proud of her Iranian heritage in the face of prejudice and ignorance and misinformation, but becomes very, very depressed in doing so.  She somehow manages to retain her fierce intensity in the face of suicide attempts, illness and divorce from an Iranian man, which is taboo!

Again, Ms. Satrapi has done a magnificent and powerful job conveying her lifestory with minimalistic but yet powerful and beautiful art! She somehow relates to us the struggles of immigrants in foreign countries and women in a fundamentalist Islamic society, where a single strand of hair or lipstick can be the basis for an arrest and divorce is considered a mortal sin! She is honest and endearing and funny and empathetic and candid.  Her story tugged at my heartstrings! She uses cutting wit - wit that sears the message into both your brain and heart - to tell her story and I appreciated this very, very much. For instance, there is a scene later in the novel after she has returned to Tehran. She is running to catch her bus because she’s late and she is stopped by the morality police who tell her to stop running because the movement of running makes her butt move in ways that they consider obscene. She yells at them “Well then don’t look at my ass” and continues to run to catch her bus. I loved this - such a simple interaction conveys so many messages: how women’s bodies are controlled etc. It’s wonderful! This book and its predecessor are books that all should read and should read multiple times!

Book 20/100

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