Marjane Satrapi was born in iran. She is a excellent writer! she has a new book out more a follow up on her persepolis book, this one is called persepolis 2. It has very good reviews. You can really get a glimpse of what revolution was like in Iran. Here is a review of her book from the new york times...not that, that means anything
The first volume of Marjane Satrapi's ''Persepolis'' is a hard act to follow. Subtitled ''The Story of a Childhood,'' it is indeed that, albeit a childhood overshadowed from the age of 9 by Iran's Islamic revolution, and including among much else the deaths of beloved relatives and friends. Like Art Spiegelman's ''Maus,'' it is a ''graphic memoir'' -- a clunky label that certainly beats ''comic book'' -- but unlike ''Maus'' it is executed in an apparently simple, childlike drawing style. That simplicity is, of course, entirely appropriate to the child's viewpoint and has the additional advantages of disarming the reader and making possible the easy absorption of a great deal of complex and harrowing matter. And, as the reader comes to realize, the style isn't so simple after all. The stylized layouts effortlessly evoke centuries of Persian art, and Satrapi registers subtle emotions on the faces of her characters with the greatest economy of means. Here and there -- see for example the bottom panels on Page 93 of the present volume -- she seems to tip her hat to a formative influence, Matisse.
Volume 2 picks up where Volume 1 left off. In 1984, Satrapi's parents, liberals who lived under constant threat from the regime but were determined not to leave their country, sent her to Austria to complete her studies in safety and freedom. When Satrapi, then 14, looked back at her parents to wave goodbye before boarding the plane, she saw her father carrying away her mother, who had fainted. As ''Persepolis 2'' opens, she lies on her bed in a Vienna boardinghouse run by nuns, wondering what her roommate will be like. This may seem undramatic after the riots, raids, bombings and executions in the first volume, but then Satrapi's story is in many ways the chronicle of a normal childhood, experienced by a well-adjusted girl from a loving family, that happens to be buffeted by the upheavals of history. Part of Satrapi's brilliance is her ability to get the contrasting proportions right.
Her adolescence features the usual boy problems, authority problems, social insecurities and worries about appearance. Such issues have more serious consequences, though, because she is in a foreign land without family or protectors, and looked upon with suspicion not just by xenophobes but by people who automatically associate her with the very aspects of her own country she is there to escape. The nuns soon evict her for mouthing off, and she migrates from one temporary shelter to another. At school she hangs out with the marginals: an eccentric, two orphans and a punk enthralled by the fact that she has seen death up close. She endures a string of unworthy boyfriends, capped by one who seems like the real thing -- although he allows her to pay for everything and won't defend her to his racist mother -- until she catches him in bed with another girl. At the same time, her insane landlady wrongly accuses her of theft. She is left adrift, picking food out of trash cans and sleeping furtively in streetcars. After two months of this, in the middle of winter, she collapses, waking up in the hospital. Since she has graduated from high school by this time, she sees no alternative but to return to Iran.
There, she finds that her troubles look trivial -- eight years of the Iran-Iraq war have ravaged her country, left it in her eyes an immense mausoleum in which every third street has been renamed after a ''martyr.'' Meanwhile, her friends have gotten themselves up to look like the heroines of American television shows, but when she confides to them that she has had sexual experiences, they accuse her of being a whore. Feeling trapped, she falls into depression and tries to kill herself, but a large dose of antidepressants only causes her to sleep for three days. So she resolves to take herself in hand. She gains admission to the university to study art, even passing the ideological test, and meets the man she will marry -- even though the match seems less than ideal.
Like many young Iranians, Satrapi proceeds with a life of well-hidden pleasures, close calls, periodic arrests and constant harassment. The end is a given -- the very existence of the two volumes of ''Persepolis'' attests that she will finally reach her limit and go abroad again, this time for good. Satrapi's story is compelling and extremely complex, not simply in its windings and reversals of fortune but in its manifold ironies and acknowledged contradictions. It would have made a stirring document no matter how it was told, but the graphic form, with its cinematic motion and its style as personal as handwriting, endows it with a combination of dynamism and intimacy uniquely suited to a narrative at once intensely subjective and world-historical.
And it is wildly charming. Satrapi's voice is as artfully artless as her graphic style, never giving any indication of effort or calculation but simply communicating, in a way that feels unmediated, like a letter from a friend, in this case a wonderful friend: honest, strong-willed, funny, tender, impulsive, self-aware. It's hard saying goodbye at the end, but the end of the story marks the beginning of her ability to tell it.
The first volume of Marjane Satrapi's ''Persepolis'' is a hard act to follow. Subtitled ''The Story of a Childhood,'' it is indeed that, albeit a childhood overshadowed from the age of 9 by Iran's Islamic revolution, and including among much else the deaths of beloved relatives and friends. Like Art Spiegelman's ''Maus,'' it is a ''graphic memoir'' -- a clunky label that certainly beats ''comic book'' -- but unlike ''Maus'' it is executed in an apparently simple, childlike drawing style. That simplicity is, of course, entirely appropriate to the child's viewpoint and has the additional advantages of disarming the reader and making possible the easy absorption of a great deal of complex and harrowing matter. And, as the reader comes to realize, the style isn't so simple after all. The stylized layouts effortlessly evoke centuries of Persian art, and Satrapi registers subtle emotions on the faces of her characters with the greatest economy of means. Here and there -- see for example the bottom panels on Page 93 of the present volume -- she seems to tip her hat to a formative influence, Matisse.
Volume 2 picks up where Volume 1 left off. In 1984, Satrapi's parents, liberals who lived under constant threat from the regime but were determined not to leave their country, sent her to Austria to complete her studies in safety and freedom. When Satrapi, then 14, looked back at her parents to wave goodbye before boarding the plane, she saw her father carrying away her mother, who had fainted. As ''Persepolis 2'' opens, she lies on her bed in a Vienna boardinghouse run by nuns, wondering what her roommate will be like. This may seem undramatic after the riots, raids, bombings and executions in the first volume, but then Satrapi's story is in many ways the chronicle of a normal childhood, experienced by a well-adjusted girl from a loving family, that happens to be buffeted by the upheavals of history. Part of Satrapi's brilliance is her ability to get the contrasting proportions right.
Her adolescence features the usual boy problems, authority problems, social insecurities and worries about appearance. Such issues have more serious consequences, though, because she is in a foreign land without family or protectors, and looked upon with suspicion not just by xenophobes but by people who automatically associate her with the very aspects of her own country she is there to escape. The nuns soon evict her for mouthing off, and she migrates from one temporary shelter to another. At school she hangs out with the marginals: an eccentric, two orphans and a punk enthralled by the fact that she has seen death up close. She endures a string of unworthy boyfriends, capped by one who seems like the real thing -- although he allows her to pay for everything and won't defend her to his racist mother -- until she catches him in bed with another girl. At the same time, her insane landlady wrongly accuses her of theft. She is left adrift, picking food out of trash cans and sleeping furtively in streetcars. After two months of this, in the middle of winter, she collapses, waking up in the hospital. Since she has graduated from high school by this time, she sees no alternative but to return to Iran.
There, she finds that her troubles look trivial -- eight years of the Iran-Iraq war have ravaged her country, left it in her eyes an immense mausoleum in which every third street has been renamed after a ''martyr.'' Meanwhile, her friends have gotten themselves up to look like the heroines of American television shows, but when she confides to them that she has had sexual experiences, they accuse her of being a whore. Feeling trapped, she falls into depression and tries to kill herself, but a large dose of antidepressants only causes her to sleep for three days. So she resolves to take herself in hand. She gains admission to the university to study art, even passing the ideological test, and meets the man she will marry -- even though the match seems less than ideal.
Like many young Iranians, Satrapi proceeds with a life of well-hidden pleasures, close calls, periodic arrests and constant harassment. The end is a given -- the very existence of the two volumes of ''Persepolis'' attests that she will finally reach her limit and go abroad again, this time for good. Satrapi's story is compelling and extremely complex, not simply in its windings and reversals of fortune but in its manifold ironies and acknowledged contradictions. It would have made a stirring document no matter how it was told, but the graphic form, with its cinematic motion and its style as personal as handwriting, endows it with a combination of dynamism and intimacy uniquely suited to a narrative at once intensely subjective and world-historical.
And it is wildly charming. Satrapi's voice is as artfully artless as her graphic style, never giving any indication of effort or calculation but simply communicating, in a way that feels unmediated, like a letter from a friend, in this case a wonderful friend: honest, strong-willed, funny, tender, impulsive, self-aware. It's hard saying goodbye at the end, but the end of the story marks the beginning of her ability to tell it.