Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return by Marjane Satrapi
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Marjane Satrapi is among the very best artists
working in sequential art, pictures and words crafted into a seamless whole of comic strip-like appearance. Rather than a daily dose of the funnies, however, her work conveys a mixture of serious drama and sharp humor as she relates her life in modern Iran. The first volume of Satrapi's comic-strip memoir, Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, depicted the author/artist's experiences as a young girl growing up during the upheaval of Iran's revolution. Despite losing family members to prison and gaining the burden of wearing the veil, Satrapi remained a feisty teenager intent on furthering her education and carrying on her family's resistance to fundamentalism. This second volume is Satrapi's personal coming-of-age story. We follow young Marji as she begins her schooling in Austria in the 1980s. Having left an Iran transformed by strict Islamic law and wrecked by its war with Iraq, she is a fish out of water among her Western classmates, to whom her life experiences seem like made-up fairy tales. Her circumstances are extreme, but it's easy to identify with the everyday details of her life: Marji does well in math, makes friends with a group of outcasts (a colorful cast of '80s European punks), and gets her heart broken by her first love. Eventually, she returns to Tehran as an adult and begins to confront the reality of limited choices that her country offers to an educated young woman of talent and ambition. The book's black-and-white illustrations and overall sense of design are wonderfully strong. Satrapi pulls the reader in with her biting humor and her frustrated tirades against the skewed ideas Westerners hold of her homeland and her fellow Iranians. She offers us a rare opportunity to witness the daily joys and fears of people who are, regardless of distance and tradition, strangely familiar. Her book will interest readers interested in the modern Middle East, women’s lives, and any developing graphic artists. Review by Mark Bradshaw, September 9, 2004 Watermark’s web site offers a review of Satrapi’s earlier work and of another memoir that deals with the politics of women’s lives in post-revolution Iran: Persepolis 1: the Story of a Childhood by Marjane Satrapi |