Title: Persepolis Volume(s): 1 Author(s): Marjane Satrapi Format: Unflipped; Right-to-Left Publisher: Random House MSRP: $9.99 Genre(s): Drama Rated: Teen (13+)

 

CONSUMER ADVICE

Parents,the first book mainly deals with politics and Iranian politics under theocracy can be scary, as houses are bombed, people are executed, and soldiers are shown in hospitals without limbs. The second volume, on the other hand, deals with sex, drugs and suicide at one point, and the joy and sorrow of growing up. If you have teenagers, you may want to read the second volume with them and then have a discussion about the themes it brings up. This isn’t a disturbing Confidential Confessions; you’ll feel more comfortable reading this. People who liked Maus will love this duo, as both series are essentially memoirs/autobiographies in comic book form. If you’re used to American graphic novels with fantasy and superheroes, then you’re in for a big surprise. I was.

What makes manga so popular in both the US and Japan is the fact that manga spans many genres, no matter how clichéd or outdated they become. More recently, this is what graphic novels are evolving into. We Americans have the creepy Watchmen, the supernatural Sandman, the occasional Spiderman or Batman stories, and real biographies/memoirs like Maus. Persepolis isn’t in the category of American graphic novels because it’s not an American comic; it’s a French graphic novel translated into English. But the translation isn’t flawed at all. It flows well and I thought at first that the story was written in English to begin with. It isn’t even till you read the author’s biography at the end that you realize that the author, who is also the artist, is the main character.

The story does start out like it’s going to be supernatural: Little Marjane Satrapi believes that she is the next prophet of God, and talks to him in her private moments like in bed or the bathtub. But once we get past that part, we realize that the story is indeed realistic. It talks of how Iran changes when the Shah (leader) is forced to leave and religious radicals take over the government. It talks of how people rebel against what they believe is injustice, and how sometimes laughter is the best medicine in hard times. But it also talks of how Marjane grows from a young girl to a modern woman, and the eventual decisions that affect her life and others.

One element that experiences evolution was the art. It starts out a bit amateurish (that is, hairstyles are off and people seem to sport blob-like clothes), but by the second volume Marjane has her style down to pat. Given that this was her first huge project in terms of drawing, it’s no surprise. It’s a bit hard to tell some people apart, but not much. Minor characters tend to blur out of mind anyway, so you shouldn’t have problems with the same name for two people (i.e., Reza). What’s more interesting is how the focus shifts from politics to Marjane adjusting to Vienna in the second book. (At the end of the first book, her parents sent her to Vienna since she started acting radical in school.) I personally find her more interesting than the politics in Iran as we see her make mistakes that we would probably make in her place, go through romance the way you’d expect someone to, and how she eventually decides to return to Iran. How she managed to say all of her personal thoughts and opinions astonished me. How she remembered them was astonishing as well. Although she said in an interview that some parts were changed to tell the story better, it seems like the bare facts are true. Even so, you can laugh, cry, and sometimes warm up to the situation at hand. More often you will cry, for the books are depressing at times. Marjane herself shows that she is not always innocent, having been a drug dealer and framing a man to save herself from possible arrest. Yet neither are the people around her, whether they are her parents, her friends, or even her husband. That sense of realism and lack of romanticism saves the story from one of the more possible pitfalls in memoirs.

Probably the people who will like this series the most are girls. I could be wrong, but it seems that women would more likely appreciate Marjane’s literal and figurative growing pains in the second volume than men for the simple reason that young girls will learn what to expect and older women will relate to the growing pains that they went through from teenagers to adults. Men might like the political details in the first book, but the second book may turn them off unless they are willing to read a good story over their usual manga or comics.

If there’s any part of the story that may feel uncomfortable for people, it’s the part where Marjane goes through a period of depression in Vienna. She just ends her romance with her boyfriend and on impulse leaves her apartment and takes to the streets. There she spends two months in winter weather, developing bronchitis. This may be disturbing for weak-hearted people because she talks of how it was hard to find a safe place to sleep at night and how she would steal food from garbage cans and smoke cigarette buns thrown on the ground. There is also a section where she reflects that she has nowhere to go to in Vienna; in her first apartment the owners, a married couple were always fighting, in the second one she was thrown out for insulting the nuns, the people in her third home moved, and in her last house the landlady has accused her of stealing a brooch. We as middle-class people believe that most homeless people are bums and druggies. Marjane was once an exception, and that is scary because of what happened to her. It could happen again to someone else.

However, as stated in the Consumer Advice, this is NOT like Confidential Confessions! The author actually went through most, if not all the events that feature her in this series. If Reiko Momochi had done the same for her series, then people would be confused at the one-sided issues and the disturbing three-dimensional problems in her life. Marjane doesn’t tell us whether or not she’s a good person, but lets us see and decide for ourselves. She shows some of the so-called “teen issues” that After School Special highlighted, but there’s no preaching on what to do. In the end we can say that she’s neither neither the angel of the world nor the demon of the world, but someone we understand. Her actions are explained if not justified, just like ours. We are seeing a real person through not her eyes, but through her graphic novel’s eyes. Believe me, if all memoirs and autobiographies were like this, then people wouldn’t complain about their self-indulgent in-jokes.

- -Review By Jaya Lakshmi - -