Kesher Talk

Dazzling literature department. This week I've been reading Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, the true story of her childhood in Iran during the Islamic Revolution, told in graphic novel form. (Does that make it a graphic memoir?)

The artwork is stark, almost woodcut-like. The characters practically leap off the page. Satrapi shows us the weird, confusing, terrible events of the Revolution and the early Iran-Iraq war through a child's eyes, and makes her childhood voice believable (no simple task for an adult whose memories are necessarily colored by the intervening years). When the book begins, she is nine and the Shah is still in power. When it ends, she is fourteen and so much has changed...

Persepolis is an excellent primer on life in Iran during those years. It offers insight into how one ordinary family dealt with the revolution, the regime change, the propaganda. It is beautifully-written and beautifully-drawn.

Some might argue that there's little connection between an Iranian woman's memoir-in-comics and the (presumably Jewish) readers of this Jewish blog. I'd disagree, and not just because of the poignant vignette about the Jewish family on Satrapi's street. The nations of the Middle East continue to struggle with the inevitable tension between those who support religious states and those who favor secularism -- a tension this book chronicles and humanizes admirably -- and engaging with Satrapi's story is both broadening and sobering.

Time's reviewer agrees with me. The Village Voice liked it, but thinks it doesn't hold up beside Art Spiegelman's masterwork Maus. I'm actually more with Time than with the Voice on this one (mark that on your calendars!) -- I think Persepolis belongs on a shelf with Maus, and with Howard Cruse's Stuck Rubber Baby, for that matter: powerful stories of our time, told in an unexpected way.

posted by Rachel @ 2/17/2004 06:07:10 PM