Alright, this is the last graphic novel by Marjane Satrapi that I have. I read Persepolis and immediately took the others out from the library. Chicken with Plums recounts the story of Nasser Ali Khan who is apparently a wonderful tar player. A tar is a string instrument that somewhat resembles a guitar. We never get to hear/see him play the tar, however, because when the story opens his beloved tar has been broken and he is searching for a replacement. The instruments that he auditions do not seem to speak to him as his old instrument did. He becomes depressed and decides that he wants to die. Taken to his bed the graphic novel replays his last week of life. His family attempts to persuade him otherwise but he is determined. While he waits for death to take him, he remembers moments from his childhood, a lost love and his subsequent marriage to his wife, his time as a pupil of the tar, and other moments both bitter and sweet. There is even a visit by Death who has a sense of humor.

This autobiographical animated film from 2007 is an excellent view into the Iran of the last thirty years. It opens with the Iranian Revolution and the high hopes of all Iranians looking to get out from under the Shah only to find out the Islamacists ended up as bad or worse.

The film is informative, happy, wistful and more, and it was very interesting for me to watch after this year’s ongoing green wave in Iran against the hard line Islamic leadership and the election by the ruling despots.

Hit this link to find Persepolis on DVD at Amazon.

Marjane Satrapi, Chicken with Plums, 2004
This is not as long as Satrapi’s more famous works Persepolis 1 and Persepolis 2 but it carries the same emotional punch and beauty. It’s more of a short story that can be read over a few hours, with a final scene that takes you by surprise with its poetic beauty and tragedy. Chicken with Plums is the favourite dish of Nasser Ali Khan, a renowned master of the tar and a distant relative of Marjane’s. The story follows the 8 days Nasser lay in his bedroom in 1958 (11 years before her birth), intent on dying while memories of his past flooded his mind. Mixing fact and fiction, Marjane explores Iranian family life and culture through his story, with her customary incisive attacks on the Revolution and America/Britain’s damage to her country. Definitely one of those books you must read and share with your loved ones.

Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, like Alan Moore’s Watchmen and Art Spiegelman’s Maus, is one of those graphic novels that I’ve been told again and again transcends the medium.  I’ve always had a soft spot for comics and I’ve always believed that graphic novels can be just as powerful as regular novels – the Bone series is still one of my favorite series of all time.   However, erudite and learned individuals tell me that isn’t acceptable in the real world… and because they have to sublimate those feelings for comics, they turn to books like this.

First off, Satrapi’s book is very good.  The copy I read (published by Vintage Books in England) is the complete novel – that is, both parts (“The Story of a Childhood” and “The Story of a Return”).  I think that, honestly, splitting the novel into two books actually does it a bit of a disservice.  I don’t just mean with the double dipping (my copy cost the equivalent of $11.  Volume 1 as a standalone paperback in the US? $12.  That’s just… ridiculous.  Anyway, off THAT high horse and back to the topic at hand: the novel.

It is, as so many other books I’ve found myself reading this year, a coming-of-age narrative.  It’s a true story, about Satrapi’s childhood in Iran in the late 70s and early 80s – a time period which needs no introduction.  As Satrapi manages to point out in narration, the effects of the Revolution are still very VERY clearly felt today.  In the context of a coming-of-age narrative, the story works very well.  The art is beautifully simple – stark blacks and whites, simple lines, nothing complex or “ooh-ahh” but instead something just very comfortable.  It is easy to take in the frames and the words at the same time, as opposed to having to focus on one or the other.

Satrapi has a gift for storytelling, as well.  She has a great wit and finds ways to make even the starkest and saddest of moments light.  She doesn’t undercut the sentiment or anything – she just makes them bearable.  What she doesn’t do well, however, is brought to light at the end of the novel.  Literally, the last fifteen pages (give or take, probably more like the last ten but I’m cushioning) felt SO forced and stilted that I almost thought someone else had written them.  She presents a sequence of scenes between her and her parents (a few other people pop in) where they talk about the regime circa 1995 or so and how bad it is.  This is really no different than earlier in the novel – she’d presented many scenes where any number of characters spoke eloquently about the horrors and atrocities of the Iranian religious regime… but this sequence just felt forced.  It felt very “after school special” as the saying goes.  It really undercut the power of the novel and the jarring ending – Satrapi at the airport again, this time for a happier leaving, waving to her parents and grandmother… but the last caption ends with the fact that her grandmother died within about a year.  REALLY quite a strange ending) – just felt unpolished, like it’d been rushed to that conclusion and then she realized “shit, I don’t have anywhere else to go… so… we’ll just push this all into the last few pages and shove it out the door.”

To Sum Up: Despite the rough ending, I really enjoyed this book.  It is one of those graphic novels that smarty-pants people can read and not feel as though they’re lowering themselves to comics.  I personally think those people need a reality check but hey – that’s just me.

Last week I read Persepolis and enjoyed it so i immediately read Persepolis 2. In this book, Satrapi continues the story of her life where her first story left off. She is a young lady and too escape the war has left her home in Iran at the request of her parents to study in Austria. Her roommate and fellow classmates are quite different from what she is used to. There are some bumps in the road as she tries to belong and as she is gripped by the alienation of adolescence. She is growing up and she eventually finds herself moving again and eventually returning home. She views her time abroad as a failure.

For a child who grew up during wartime, Satrapi’s eyes are dramatically opened during her independence. There are drugs, relationships, new ideals to ponder, and coming to terms with a changing body and a new identity. After returning to Iran, she realizes that her old friends are strangers, and that both she and her country has changed. She has to work hard to pull herself into a new place and start a new chapter in her life-as a woman. She attends university to study art and in true Satrapi fashion challenges the notions held by the women and men there.

Satrapi discusses the search for self and identity, the importance of education and family, and the roles of women as dictated by religion, by society and by the women themselves. She shows that throughout ups and downs family will always provide support and home is a great place for rest and reflection. That you can always start over. I enjoyed the sequel a bit more than the first. I was touched by the experiences that Satrapi had.

Persepolis and Persepolis 2 together make up my first non-fiction work for the Women Unbound Challenge.

The premise of Embroideries is that a group of female relatives has just finished dinner and is sitting down to enjoy tea and an evening of conversation and good company. The women sip their tea and discuss all sorts of things. It is just like you’re sitting there with them. These could be the women in my family, telling stories about their experiences as young women, as wives, mothers, friends and confidants. Some of these characters I recognized from Satrapi’s biographical graphic novel Persepolis-namely her mother and grandmother. Like Persepolis, Embroideries is also a graphic novel but the format is a bit different. Satrapi does not use the traditional comic book panels and the drawings are more free-flowing across the page, sort of like the conversation.

The conversation turns to sexual experiences, arranged marriages, and the pursuit of beauty among other things, all of which serve to illustrate their experiences as Iranian women. Their stories are influenced by the social constraints that govern women during this time in Iran and serve as a sort of documentation of sexuality throughout the lifespan. It may seem that these women should be pitied because of their socially imposed silence but they are not helpless nor hopeless. There is something inspiring in their resolve to openly discuss the ways in which they handle these situations. They tell their stories with humor and their ability to be witty displays a strong sense of power.

I’ve read about this graphic novel around the blogosphere and wanted to read it after seeing a trailer for the screen adaptation. And I have to say I enjoyed it. I wasn’t sure that I would (I’ve only read one other graphic novel) but Satrapi does a wonderful job telling the story of her life in words and pictures. There are funny moments and some that are heart-wrenching.

Persepolis is Satrapi’s account of her life growing up in a financially stable family in Iran in the 70s and 80s. The backdrop for her story is the Islamic Revolution and the war with Iraq. Although Satrapi is a young girl during this time she is obviously very bright and inquisitive, she also has no problems speaking her mind and getting answers to her questions. Her parents are fervent Marxists who attend demonstrations and talk with her about the revolution. She struggles with death and prisoners of war (some of whom she knows personally), with religious ideals, and social constructions. She was a little girl that I loved immediately. She has intense conversations with God and was convinced that she was to become a prophet. Her favorite comic book was ‘Dialectic Materialism’ starring Marx and Descartes.

My favorite part is when she realizes what the revolution is about. She tried to understand by reading books but it is the moment that she thinks about the professions of others in her life; porter, window washer, carpet weaver, and the maid that lives in her house that she begins to understand. Satrapi says that she never understood why she felt ashamed to ride in her father’s Cadillac or why Mehri, the maid could not marry who she loved. She realizes that the reasons for her shame and the war boil down to social classes.

“When I went back to her room she [the maid] was crying. We were not in the same social class but at least we were in the same bed.”

Satrapi gives us the history of her life and her country as she experienced it. Her adventures reveal a lot about the inconsistencies embedded in social structures. I enjoyed this one and was pleased to find out that she has other graphic novels. I will post my thoughts on these books later this week. And I’m going to watch the movie.

The English papers are full of lists today. Both The Times and The Telegraph have put out their top/defining books of the decade. President Obama makes both “best” lists, while Dan Brown makes both “best” and “worst” and Cormac McCarthy and JK Rowling share top spots on the “best” lists.

The Times’ Top 5:

5. Suite Française by Irène Némirovsky (2006)
Its astonishing rediscovery more than 40 years after Nemirovsky’s death in Auschwitz should not overshadow that the two novellas here are miniature masterpieces. In the first the veneer of civilisation is stripped from a group of Parisians fleeing the advancing Germans, while the second is a moving tale of forbidden love across the divide of war.

4. Masterworks of the Classical Haida Mythtellers trans Robert Bringhurst (2002) One hundred years ago Ghandl and Skaay, two great native poets of the northwest coast of Canada, spoke their stories aloud; Bringhurst’s translations and analysis bring a lost world brilliantly to life.

3. Dreams from My Father: A Story of Race and Inheritance by Barack Obama (2004)
The book that revealed Barack Obama as not just an ambitious politician, but also as an eloquent writer and deep thinker. The fascinating story of his early life, first published in 1995, was reissued in 2004 and became a worldwide bestseller as momentum for the presidency built.

2. Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi (2003)
With its feisty, irresistible heroine and shapely, naive style, Satrapi’s comic-book account of her childhood during the Islamic Revolution in Iran is hugely enjoyable — and an essential, humanising eye-opener on a little-understood country. From an interview with Oprah Winfrey, 2007

1. The Road by Cormac McCarthy (2006)
Cormac McCarthy’s gripping, shattering novel walks in a long line of tradition. Mary Shelley tried her hand at the literature of post-apocalypse with The Last Man, published in 1826; Russell Hoban’s 1980 novel, Riddley Walker, sets the aftermath of doom in Canterbury. The Road’s wilderness — coming to the cinema in January — is an American one: blasted, ruined, destroyed by an unnamed calamity that has scorched the Earth with biblical fury and lit McCarthy’s prose with holy fire. In this awful landscape walk a father and his young son, treading towards a future where it would seem there could be none.

McCarthy has always been a poet of extremity; his earlier novels stripped romance from the myth of the frontier. The Road is stripped back even farther, its father and son the near-sole survivors of what might be called humanity; the book’s narrative is simply that of their survival. There are respites from their suffering —- a cache or two of unspoilted tinned food —- but more often there is horror; this is existence pared to the bone. For this reason, it is McCarthy’s language that must carry the book, and so it does, triumphantly, its Hemingway-like concision shot through with cadences that sometimes recall the sprung rhythms of Gerard Manley Hopkins.

The Telegraph’s Top 5 of Books That Defined The Decade:

5. The God Delusion by Richard Dawkins Bantam, 2006
Belief in God is not only totally irrational, but actively harmful to society, says Richard Dawkins. Whether you agree with him or not, his book was a popular demolition job of the world’s great faiths.

4. A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius by Dave Eggers Picador, 2000
One of the first of the “creative” memoirs, this chronicled Eggers’s life with his younger siblings after the death of their parents from cancer. Bold, dazzling and fantastical, it launched a new style of writing.

3. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown Corgi, 2003
Dan Brown may not be able to write, but he sure can pull in the punters. A mad mishmash of conspiracy theories about Jesus built around the most basic elements of a thriller, this has sold almost as many copies as the Bible and has made the world’s pulse beat faster.

2. Dreams from My Father by Barack Obama Canongate, 2007
Originally published in 1995 in the US, this was launched in Britain to enormous acclaim before the first black president took to the world stage. Candid and sensitively written, the memoir is a search for his father (who left when Obama was two) and his racial identity. A touchstone for future politicians.

1. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows by JK Rowling Bloomsbury, 2007
If you don’t know what a Muggle is by now, you’re either Rip van Winkle or enormously stubborn. This is the seventh and final instalment in Rowling’s record-breaking series about Harry Potter, the world’s most famous lightning-scarred boy wizard and his tribulations with Lord Voldemort. We’ve seen Harry grow from a spindly, messy-haired 11-year-old into a heroic young adult. Children have grown up with him, finding in his battles metaphors for their own. This volume alone sold 15 million copies in the first 24 hours after it was published. Whether wickedly skewering suburbia, or bringing Harry, Ron and Hermione into mortal danger, Rowling is never less than absorbing. Some may sneer at her books, but they are triumphant sagas about the defeat of evil that tap into our basic hunger for stories. Most importantly, she makes reading a 700-page book seem easy. This one even has a quotation from Aeschylus as its epigraph. It stands as a cornerstone of the decade, a melding of high and low culture that appeals to all ages and nations.

And, The Times’ worst books of the ’00s:

5. Dylan’s Visions of Sin by Christopher Ricks (2003)
It’s not that Dylan’s lyrics aren’t worth studying, or that Ricks lacks the intellect for the job. It’s just that this “love letter to Dylan” is as embarrassing to read as any adolescent epistle if you’re not in the relationship yourself.

4. Vernon God Little by D. B. C. Pierre (2003)
This ugly, lazy debut about a school massacre in Texas won the Man Booker Prize in 2003: the judges said that it was a “coruscating black comedy reflecting our alarm but also our fascination with America”; we beg to differ.

3. Being Jordan by Katie Price (2004)
The book that made possible not only her “literary” career, but also those of such figures as Jade Goody and Kerry Katona. Highly influential, but not in a good way.

2. The Secret by Rhonda Byrne (2006)
Telling us that we need to think positive thoughts, we could accept. But to dress up the advice with inadequately assimilated quantum theories, along with references to Jesus, Newton, Beethoven and Einstein: this was unbearable.

1. The Da Vinci Code by Dan Brown (2003)
“Renowned curator Jacques Sauniere . . .” not the intro to a tabloid news story, but to the bestselling adult novel of the decade. The irrelevance of prose quality to sales has surely never been so starkly revealed.

Finally, The Independent has the 50 Best Winter Reads. Unfortunately, you have to click through 50 pictures.

The 100 Best Books Of The Decade
100 books that defined the noughties – Telegraph
The 5 Worst Books Of The Decade – Times Online
The 50 best winter reads – Arts & Books, IndyBest – The Independent

Last week I got a copy of a graphic novel memoir about a young woman growing up in Iran. That wasn’t called Persepolis. This was Nylon Road by Parsua Bashi and that Persepolis comparison is all over this book. Persepolis is mentioned in the first line of the book’s back cover summary. In one of the later chapters Bashi has drawn herself reading Persepolis. All through my time reading it I was comparing it to Persepolis, and it definitely comes off the weaker.

Bashi tells her story of growing up in Iran and emigrating to Switzerland in the form of a series of conversations with herself from different ages. It’s a decent enough setup to compare her views now with views she had at different ages. Speaking of ages, the back cover talks about it being a young woman’s struggles but she was 40 when the book was published. The point of view throughout is much more mature than young as she tells us about how she used to think. It’s broken into small chapters that aren’t very sequential. More of a collection of ruminations. Selah.

Art-wise, there’s not a lot exciting going on. She uses a similar simple style to Satrapi’s work in Persepolis, which is fine, but doesn’t help avoid comparisons between the two.

I wasn’t a huge fan of the book. Maybe if Persepolis isn’t available and you need a memoir about a woman growing up in Iran this would be fine. It would also work very well as a secondary source in an essay about the graphic memoir form (in a “in books like Persepolis and Nylon Road…” kind of way).

Hier ein Artikel zu Marjane Satrapi und Joe Sacco, der bereits im Juli 2004 in der StadtRevue erschien…

Revolution und Besatzung sind eine gute Story

Seit Art Spiegelman hat der Comic dazugelernt. Aktuelle Erfolge haben Marjane Satrapi und Joe Sacco: In »Palästina« und »Persepolis« behandeln sie den Stoff menschlicher Tragödien auf unterschiedliche Weise. Lewis Gropp las Sprechblasen und blätterte sich durch Bilderwelten

Goethe hatte ein Problem: Immer, wenn ihn Trübsinn übermannte und er zur Feder griff, um seine seelischen Schmerzen zu Papier zu bringen, verwandelte er diese dabei in schöne Kunst, um die man ihn beneidete. Keiner konnte sich vorstellen, dass ein so ästhetisch ausgeformter Schmerz auch wirklich belastend sein könnte, und viele, denen es besser ging, hätten wohl gerne getauscht, um auch so schön zu leiden wie »der Bescheidwisser aus Weimar«.
Bei Marjane Satrapis überraschend erfolgreichen autobiografischen Cartoon-Roman »Persepolis« (mehr als 200.000 verkaufte Exemplare allein in Frankreich) verhält es sich ganz ähnlich. Satrapis Schilderungen der iranischen Revolution, des staatlichen Terrors sowie des Krieges mit dem Nachbarland Irak, der Bombenangriffe auf Teheran sind so elegant und kunstvoll in Szene gesetzt, dass der reale Horror hinter den Bildern ein Stück weit auf der Strecke bleibt. Im Interview hat Satrapi erklärt, sie habe auf alle Fälle vermeiden wollen, die Geschichte mit einer wehleidigen und larmoyanten Patina zu überziehen. Sie wusste, dass die Geschichte dadurch ungenießbar geworden wäre. So also hat sich Iranerin entschlossen, die Geschichte aus der Sicht des heranwachsenden Mädchens zu erzählen, das sie selbst einst war.

Die ehemalige Kinderbuchautorin hat so eine ganz eigene Bildersprache entwickelt: Die philosophisch angehauchte Fantasie der kleinen Marji bringt die Geschichte zum Schweben, und ihr rebellischer Geist verleiht der Kleinen einen gewissen heroischen Glanz. Viele Anekdoten in dem Buch glänzen mit hintergründigem Witz. Marjis Lieblingscartoon heißt »Der Dialektische Materialismus«. Darin diskutieren Descartes und Marx über Ontologie. Descartes stellt seine Behauptung auf, dass die materielle Welt nicht wirklich existiert – »Sie ist nur eine Reflexion unserer Vorstellung« -, woraufhin Marx seine materialistische Weltanschauung dadurch untermauert, dass er dem Franzosen einen Stein gegen die Rübe pfeffert und somit einen Punktsieg landet.
Daneben finden sich in »Persepolis« auch profanere Anekdoten. Als Marjis Eltern von einer Reise aus der Türkei zurückkommen, bringen sie Poster von Kim Wilde und Iron Maiden mit, und ausgerüstet mit den neuen Nike-Turnschuhe und dem Micheal-Jackson-Sticker, aber auch mit dem vorgeschriebenen Kopftuch, wagt sich Marji vor die Tür. Während sie »We’re the kids in America« vor sich hinsummt, pirschen sich die Revolutions-Wächterinnen an. Leider nehmen sie dem Mädchen nicht ab, dass der Mann auf ihrem Sticker Malcom X ist, Anführer der schwarzen Muslime in Amerika, und ihr Instinkt sagt ihnen auch, dass sie die Turnschuhe nicht für den Sportunterricht braucht – »Schweig! Es ist Punk!«

Satrapi befreit ihre düstere Geschichte von dem kunstphilosophischen Prinzip der Mimesis, nach der die Kunst das Leben nachbilden sollte. Das ist ein Grund für die ungeheure Popularität des Buches: Dem Leser wird nicht schwindelig, weil ihm der Abgrund, der hinter den beschriebenen Ereignissen liegt, nicht in vollem Ausmaß bewusst gemacht wird. Dadurch, dass die kleine Heldin der Geschichte all die Gefahren übersteht und der fundamentalistische Terror, der im Zuge der Iranischen Revolution freigesetzt wurde, sie nicht zermürbt, sondern ihr im Gegenteil dabei behilflich zu sein scheint, ihre liberalen Glaubensgrundsätze überhaupt erst zu festigen, dadurch bekommt dieser »Bildungs-Cartoon« eine leicht abenteuerliche Aura, und der Leser ertappt sich bei dem idiotischen Gedanken: Wow, was für eine aufregende Zeit das gewesen sein muss…

Auch die Geschichten, die Joe Sacco in »Palästina« erzählt, sind aufregend, allerdings auf eine andere Art. Sacco arbeitet nicht mit romanhafter Dramaturgie, sondern mit der drastischen Unmittelbarkeit des Reportagestils. Der Amerikaner hat sich im Winter 1991/92 zwei Monate lang in den besetzten Gebieten aufgehalten und mit den Palästinensern über die Vertreibung, die Unterdrückung, die Gefängnisse und das Leben in den Flüchtlingslagern unterhalten.

Sacco portraitiert sich selbst als linkischen Typen, der rein optisch rüberkommt wie eine Mischung aus Woody Allen und dem Hörzu-Igel Mecki. Das Schöne bei Sacco ist, dass er dem Leser zunächst ganz subtil und dann immer deutlicher vermittelt, wie eng das selbstlose Engagement für ein entrechtetes Volk mit dem eitlen Bestreben verbunden ist, durch diese Tätigkeit in den medialen Vordergrund zu rücken. Sacco zeichnet sich, wie er besessen durch die Straßen von Ramallah rennt, angetrieben von der leicht ins Perverse spielenden Gier nach der ganz großen Katastrophe, nach dem ganz großen Knall, weil er ahnt, dass dieser ihn nach ganz oben katapultieren würde. (»Es ist gut für den Comic! Es ist gut für den Comic!«) Mit wunderbarer Selbstironie sind auch die Szenen versehen, in denen Sacco bei seinen bettelarmen palästinensischen Bekannten immer noch einen Nachschlag nimmt, obwohl ihn sein Journalisten-Kollege von der BBC darauf aufmerksam gemacht hat, dass die Gastgeber im Flüchtlingslager die Tafel nur für die Gäste festlich eindecken, aber eigentlich selber nichts zu essen haben.

Ein großer Teil von Saccos Cartoon-Reportage widmet sich Schilderungen von Gefängnisaufenthalten und den Folterpraktiken des israelischen Geheimdienstes Shin Bet. Auch hier überzeugt der Autor trotz seiner engagierten Parteinahme durch Sachlichkeit und Detailreichtum, wie man es von einer glaubwürdigen Reportage erwarten kann. Er beschreibt, wie sich die palästinensischen Männer in den Gefängnissen organisierten, wie sie sich Lesen und Schreiben sowie verschiedene Sprachen beibrachten und wie die Professoren unter ihnen sogar Vorlesungen über Philosophie, Einstein und die israelische Friedensbewegung hielten.

So ist Saccos »Palästina« informativ, und es gelingen immer wieder feinfühlige, dramatische und würdevolle Portraits von Menschen, deren Leben von schweren Entbehrungen gezeichnet sind. Er ist ein genauer Beobachter, und er gewinnt den Personen, denen er begegnet, aber auch den Orten, die er aufsucht, eine Einmaligkeit und Intensität ab, dass man das Gefühl hat, vor Ort zu sein. In einer Szene, in der israelische Soldaten einen palästinenischen Jungen im Regen verhören, meint man, die Tropfen in den Schlamm rauschen zu hören.

Marjane Satrapis »Persepolis« ist sicherlich ein noch größeres Lesevergnügen als Joe Sackos »Palestine«, aber da, wo Satrapi kunstvoll poetisch abstrahiert, konkretisiert Sacco seine Geschichte. Deswegen ist er nicht nur politischer, sondern er kommt auch den Menschen näher, von denen er erzählt.

Joe Sacco: Palästina. Zweitausendeins, Frankfurt a.M. 2004, 285 S., 17,90 Euro.
Marjane Satrapi: Persepolis, Edition Moderne, Zürich 2004, 160 S., 22,00 Euro.

During Dewey’s 24 hour Read-a-Thon I read Neil Gaiman’s book Coraline as a graphic novel (adapted by P. Craig Russell). Technically it might not have been the first graphic novel I’ve read, but it certainly was the first one I bought myself, knowing it to be one!

About 15 years ago, shortly after I had met Mr Gnoe, I read the Pulitzer Prize winning work by Art Spiegelman: Maus, a Survivor’s Tale — an autobiographical story about Jews (depicted as mouses) surviving the World War II Holocaust. At that time I also got acquainted with the (just as grim) comic books of Tardi. Both I did not consider to be graphic novels at the time, because the term seems to be in in vogue only since the last few years.

So what is a graphic novel exactly? Well, there’s no real consensus about that Some consider it to be a posh term for all kinds of comic books provided they’re bound in a durable format like printed books, others believe there’s a distinction in artistic quality (which of course is a subjective matter).

Neil Gaiman himself — yes, I will get back to Coraline in a short while — considers it to be nothing more than a marketing term, a sales category.

[..] there’s no meaningful difference. For some reason the term “big thick collected or original comic published in book form” has never really caught on, while “Graphic Novel” did.

Myself, I am still in doubt whether or not to distinguish graphic novels from ‘ordinary’ comics. It just doesn’t feel right to call the collected Best of Mutts (Patrick McDonnell), that I bought along with Coraline, a graphic novel as well — even though it is a beautiful hardcover ‘coffee table book‘. I think I would like to hold on to the idea that a graphic novel is a story or collection of short stories in comic format (a balanced combination of narrative art and dialog or explanatory text), that holds something more than plain, popular entertainment. Like: could it be a novel without the image art? Does the story have some sustenance? I know I’m walking on thin ice here

Do you have an opinion about graphic novels?

Back to Coraline now. It’s the fantasy/horror story of a girl moving with her family to a huge house that’s divided into four apartments. Exploring the house, Coraline finds a door into an ‘other world’, where her ‘other mother and father’ live. These parents tempt her with things that are all better than at her real home, because they want her to stay.

Doesn’t that immediately make you think of Alice in Wonderland? It does even more when you read about the neighbours persisting in mispronouncing Coraline’s name as Caroline in the first pages (think Lewis Caroll). It’s been too long since I read about Alice’s adventures (I must have been a child of about 9), but it would be fun to compare the stories.

Another book Coraline reminded me of is the classic Japanese novel I was reading for the read-a-thon as well: I Am a Cat, by Natsume Sōseki (from 1905). It begins as follows:

“I am a cat. As yet I have no name.” (p.5)

And here’s when Coraline meets a cat at the new property (p.41):

And it explains to us on the same page:

“Now, you people have names because you don’t know who you are. We know who we are, so we don’t need names.”

Or, when Coraline first sees the cat on ‘the other side’ (p.39):

Cats naturally being wise, it has a theory about it on the next page (p.40):

“You people are spread all over the place. Cats on the other hand, keep ourselves together. If you see what I mean.”

Back to I Am a Cat:

“Cats are truly simple. If we want to eat, we eat; if we want to sleep, we sleep;” (p.26)

Reading synchronisity!

I guess the fact that Coraline reminded me of these classics helps in making it more of a reading experience than simple entertainment. Although it was also just plain fun to read Coraline

Like Maus, the graphic adaptation of Coraline by Russell has won an important prize: the 2009 Eisner Award (an ‘Oscar’ for comics) in the category of Best Publication for T(w)eens. Er.. that’s not my age group! And since I’ve grown up I don’t really like reading YA or children’s books. But it didn’t bother me now At least it’s obvious that a targeted audience of adults is not a condition for being called a graphic novel (as some argue).

Russell, who’s some sort of god in the graphic novel world, says about his adaptations:

“The appeal of an adaptation is in starting a piece secure that there’s literary worth in the source material. If it fails, I can’t blame it on that. I’ve always been fascinated by the challenge , the puzzle-solving challenge of taking a piece apart line by line and reassembling it into an entirely different art form.

[..] It’s the beautiful writing. It also helps that Neil has a huge following so I know all the effort I put into the work will actually be seen. I’ve done plenty of work that left me feeling I’d thrown it down a well. Doesn’t happen with Neil’s stories.”

I bought my comics for the read-a-thon following advice from veteran participants. Next to Coraline and The Best of Mutts I ended up with Persepolis and Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi. But during my 24 hours of reading I only got to read Coraline! Which indeed made a nice change of palate. And as you notice I’ve come to learn some things about the graphic novel world at the same time

Now that I’ve crawled out of my familiar reading nook I might also try one of Gaiman’s actual fantasy books — next year. For the rest of 2009 there’s something else to consider: with my other graphic books on Mt. TBR I might join the Graphic Novels Challenge… I would only need to decide on two more before December 31st to make the minor level of six books. Why not reread Maus volumes I & II?

I enjoy reading. It’s a family tradition. Shopping for us is buying books wherever we are. I love books and being surrounded by books so it’s no surprise that I like going to the library – Singapore libraries are fantastic – and Borders and Kinokuniya, the haven of bibliophiles. So when a friend suggested I pick up Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi there was no hesitation on my part until he added, “It’s a graphic novel.”  And that’s when I vacillated – I have problems reading bubbles. I read lines in the balloons but I forget to look at the illustrations. The last graphic novel I read was about a Filipino superhero – he turned into Super Girl after swallowing a magical stone.

But I breezed through bubble reading with Persepolis. The black-and-white illustrations were straightforward in its depiction of Satrapi’s childhood in Iran. They didn’t overshadow the wit, sarcasm and irony of the child, teenager and, finally, adult, as one followed her personal history, which was inextricably linked to her country’s history. It was Iran’s history in comics.

It begins with The Veil where the author/artist is 10 years old and is wearing the veil in 1980 in school. A revolution occurred in Iran a year before; a year later the revolution was called Islamic Revolution in which it became mandatory to wear the veil to school. The next frame read, “We didn’t really like to wear the veil, especially since we didn’t understand why we had to” [page 3] and the drawings succinctly captured the vacillation.  One student decided to play around with by putting it over her face, saying, “Ooh! I’m the monster of darkness.” Another decided to use it as reins– her classmate was the horse and she the equestrienne shouting “Giddy up!” A third classmate decided to tie up all the veils into a skipping rope.

She and her classmates didn’t understand the need for the veil because a year before the revolution they were in a French non-religious school where boys and girls were together. However, a year later, it was announced that “Bilingual schools were to be closed down (as) they were symbols of capitalism, of decadence.”

“This was called a ‘Cultural Revolution’. We found ourselves veiled and separated from our friends,” wrote Satrapi, “And that was that.”

This was also the period that Satrapi decided she wanted to be a prophet. Her teacher was perturbed and called her parents who were not bothered by their daughter’s declaration at all.

In The Water Cell [pages 18 – 25] the reader is privy to Satrapi’s history when her father related her family’s background, revealing their unique place in the historical annals of Iran. [Aside: I’m reminded, for some reason, of Daw Aung San Suu Kyi’s her family history.]

Father: God did not choose the king…

“The truth is that 50 years ago the Father of the Shah, who was a soldier, organized a putsch to over thrown the emperor and install a republic. At the time the Republican ideal was popular in the region but everybody interpreted it in his own way. For example, Gandhi in India, Ataturk in Turkey.

Father: So the Father of the Shah wanted to do the same. But he wasn’t educated like Gandhi, who was a lawyer or was he a leader of men like Ataturk who was a general.

“He was an illiterate low-ranking officer. A blessing for the very influential British who soon learned of his projects.

British: When you are Emperor, your Secretary of State will shine them for you.

Reza: Emperor, me?

British: But, of course, my friend. It’s much better than being President.

Reza: What do I have to do?

British: Nothing! You just give us the oil and we’ll take care of the rest.

Father: And that’s how he became king and naturally his son succeeded him. God has nothing whatsoever to do with this story…The Emperor that was overthrown was Grandpa’s father.

And since his entourage was uneducated, your Grandpa was named Prime Minister…He had studied in Europe. He was a very cultivated man. He had even read Marx. Once he was sidetracked from his Princely duties he began to meet intellectuals. So he became a communist and he was jailed often.

Mother: Sometimes they put him in a cell filled with water for hours.

The subsequent strips recount Satrapi’s experiences through her growing up years: the Iraqis bombing Iran; the scarcity of food and gasoline; the dislocation of friends and relatives whose houses were destroyed by Iraqi missiles; the prohibition of holding parties and drinking wine; the crackdown on people going against the Islamic code of living; her parents’ decision to send her to Austria in 1984 to “escape a religious Iran for an open and secular Europe” and the discovery that her mother’s best friend, Zozo, was not who she thought she would be; her cultural dislocation in Austria and epiphany; her heartaches; and her return to Iran and her decision to leave again.

Satrapi: “…Not having been able to build anything in my own country, I prepared to leave it once again. I went to France for the first time in June 1994 to take a test to enter the school of Decorative Arts in Strasbourg. I was accepted. Then I had to go back to Iran to exchange my tourist visa for a student visa. [page 339]

Between June and September 1994, the date of my definitive departure, I spent every morning wandering in the mountains of Tehran, where I memorized every corner. [page 340]

The graphic novel ends on a bittersweet note. The departure was different from 10 years ago – her mother didn’t faint and her grandmother was there.

Satrapi: “Since the night of September 9, 1994, I only saw (Grandma) once, during the Iranian New Year in March 1995. She died January 4, 1996….Freedom had a price…” [page 341]

Persepolis es la historia autobiográfica de Marjane Satrapi que luego del libro se vuelve peli animada gracias también a Vincent Paronnaud en 2007.

Persepolis fue la capital ceremonial del Imperio Persa durante del siglo VI A.C al siglo IV A.C. Está situado al nororiente de Shiraz en la provincia Farsi del Irán moderno.

Irán es un país, que al igual que sus vecinos, ha vivido en guerra como parte de su historia. Poco sabemos de la dinastía Qajar y de cómo esta colapsó para darle paso a las dinastías de Reza Khan y después la de su hijo Mohammad Reza Pahlavi. Mientras Reza Khan se volvió Shá de Irán y se alió con rusos e ingleses para mantener su reinado a cambio de petróleo, su hijo se alió con ingleses y rusos desconcertados de filiaciones nazis del padre, en la Segunda Guerra Mundial, e invitaron a Estados Unidos a controvertir y manipular el estado mediante una guerra fría. Sin embargo, el petróleo fue nacionalizado por el primer ministro y obtuvo una gran popularidad en el pueblo. Estados Unidos saboteó esa popularidad y en aras de conseguir el control del petróleo arrestó al primer ministro y prácticamente volvió el gobierno del Shá una tiranía.

Comenzó una guerra intelectual entre el gobierno y el líder espiritual musulman Ayatollah Khomeini quien criticó fuertemente la posición norteaméricana y su visión imperialista sobre Irán. El Shá no pudo contra ese poder ideológico y prácticamente sucumbió a sus ideologías. Este hecho fue precedido por una cruenta guerra civil entre afines del Shá y las guerrillas comunistas del Ayatollah quien al final promovió una teocracia de un líder supremo en alianza con ambos bandos. Las relaciones con Estados Unidos se deterioraron fuertemente y causaron una brecha diplomática que Irak aprovechó para invadir territorios en cuestión desde periodos del Shá y se emprendió la fuerte guerra entre Irak e Irán. Guerra que dejó millares de muertos y que después del conocimiento público de que Estados Unidos favorecía ambos bandos se recrudeció la fuerte posición anti-occidentalista y el fundamentalismo local.

Este contenido tan particularmente político en esta entrada es necesario por el hecho de que Satrapi, en su libro y en su peli, muestra su perspectiva como mujer idealista, comunista y revolucionaria dentro de un Irán fundamentalista, en continua guerra donde gracias a la idelogía de avanzada de sus padres y de su abuela logra ser íntegra y contestaria.

Esta peli encarna muchas cosas interesantes para mi gusto y aunque no fue tan fuerte con la presencia y protagonismo estadounidense en estos conflictos (recordar que la política beligerante de Ronald Reagan entre 1981 y 1989 se basó en la eliminación de facciones comunistas mediante patrocinio internacional e ilícito de las fuerzas contrarias así como del recrudecimiento de una guerra fría que al final dió como resultado el desmoronamiento de Unión Sovietica en una occidentalización a través de la controvertida Perestroika de Mikhail Gorbachev), me encantó que trató de ser muy imparcial en muchos sentidos.

Me encantó la ternura de la infante Satrapi y su forma descarada lúdica de ver el mundo, apoyando ingenuamente las ideologías que se debatían en su casa cual metáfora de lo que vivía su pueblo en constante cambio gubernamental.

NOTA. Logré descubrir muchas canciones populares en la peli, unas más obvias que otras, pero descubrir One de Metallica fue una verdadera sorpresa. Me dicen que hubo algo de Radiohead pero no estoy remotamente seguro. Es divertido sentarse a analizar este punto y redescubrir la cultura popular del rock en las sociedades modernas.

La animación es exquisita, no es sencilla, ni tampoco su ilustración, es un toque fatalista pero valga la redundancia exquisitamente lograda.

]]> http://locomotiveblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/new-iranian-cinema-%e2%80%93-digital-revolution-hub-or-political-stomping-ground/ Mon, 26 Oct 2009 00:16:36 +0000 Locomotive http://locomotiveblog.wordpress.com/2009/10/26/new-iranian-cinema-%e2%80%93-digital-revolution-hub-or-political-stomping-ground/ http://gnoegnoe.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/readathon-ready-set-go/ Sat, 24 Oct 2009 12:00:40 +0000 gnoegnoe http://gnoegnoe.wordpress.com/2009/10/24/readathon-ready-set-go/

This is my final readathon pile! The third book from above (Model Gliding by Marcel Möring in Dutch: Modelvliegen) I will actually not read on paper: I have the audiobook waiting on my iPod. With thanks to Elsje las!

Listening to the advise of oldtimers I’ve decided to start with a short book to get a feeling of accomplishment: The Pianoman (also in Dutch: De Pianoman), by Bernlef. It’s the boekenweekgeschenk from 2008: ‘book week present’. Each year in March there’s a week devoted to books and reading. If you spend 20 euro’s on Dutch literature, you’ll get that year’s gift written by a famous author. This started as early as 1930! In the beginning the public had to guess who the author was by reading the novella.

Oh my, I suddenly discover I forgot to put one book in the photograph… The China Lover! Well, I might even never get to it anyway

I wonder what this readathon will do to my daily post statistics… LOL The hard part of coming 24 hours will be not to spend too much time behind my computer blogging and following other readathonners! Beneath you can see my starting position. Good luck to all!

Creio eu que muitos que aqui visitam, já teve a grata oportunidade de assistir Persepolis, uma animação francesa que acabou levando uma indicação ao Oscar 2008 na categoria Melhor animação. No ano de Ratatouille, Persepolis não levou, mas ficou consagrado como um filme cult e super referência para quem quer falar de política sem ser chato.

Seria Marjane, a menina desenhada em preto e branco do filme, a nova Mafalda das famosas tirinhas de jornais? É possível traçar algumas semelhanças entre as duas personagens. Apesar de muito jovens, têm um ponto em comum: o interesse inquietante pela política. A semelhança termina aqui. Uma é da Argentina e a nossa Marjane está bem longe: Irã.

Os diretores Vicent Parannaud e Marjane Satrapi quiseram fazer um filme autobiográfico e político, mesclando aspectos importantes da história recente do país, sem cair no documentário frio e objetivo, mas numa visão diferenciada de uma menina, que se desenvolve acompanhando a revolução iraniana e suas implicações que até hoje são vistas nos notíciários. O olhar é interessante porque quase nunca é abordado, num país ainda extremamente fechado às igualdades entre homens e mulheres.

A confronto entre as culturas ocidental e oriental, as ideologias, a xenofobia, a passagem da fase adulta, tudo é muito bem registrado em Persépolis. A conversa com Deus é para mim um das cenas mais legais. Quem não assistiu, fica a dica.

Nota: 8,5/10.

alguns filmes enchem-nos perfeitamente as medidas e este foi para mim sem dúvida um desses…

Mesmo sendo uma obra de animação genial, com grandes pormenores técnicos e mantendo a fidelidade ao estilo da banda desenhada que originou o filme, o que mais me fascinou nesta longa metragem é que não é mais uma animação de final feliz hollywoodesco, com efeitos especiais de cortar a respiração ou um boneco no happy meal…

É um filme incrivelmente pessoal, descritivo dum passado e o presente dum país que aparece diáriamente nos jornais pelas piores razões, narrado através  duma visão original, comovente mas com um enorme sentido de humor, que nos deixa conhecer uma realidade que está a anos luz do nosso dia- a-dia, mas com que nos podemos de alguma forma relacionar, porque é contado de forma muito natural pela autora, Marjane Satrapi, narrando como lidou com uma revolução, uma guerra e o exilio, sempre acompanhados pelos os problemas habituais de uma criança, adolescente e adulta de qualquer país do mundo…

The Sunday Salon is a virtual gathering of booklovers on the web, where they blog about bookish things of the past week, visit each others weblogs, oh — and read

This is very exciting: on Wednesday the Monopoly 2.0 release game got started! My teammate myranya and I are called De boekenleggers, which can be translated into bookmarks – but it is a better name in Dutch because it is literally ‘the book layers’ (people laying books). Our first assignment is to leave a book at an IKEA shop… This is my 2nd time playing Bookcrossing monopoly and it was great fun last year!

Speaking of Bookcrossing: I received no less than two RABCK’s this week! (Weekly Geeks made us improve our weblogs, so I’m referring you to my new glossary for the explanation of RABCK First came Jonathan Franzen’s The Corrections from Marsala. It is #1 on the list of Best Fiction of the Millenium (so far)! Marsala read the book during the September readathon. And yesterday my surprise gift for joining in that same monthly readathon arrived! I had joined in preparation of the 24 hour Read-a-Thon of October 24th. I am really excited that I already got my pile of books done! Here’s what I will be reading during those 24 hours (although I probably won’t manage all of the books/hours):

• short stories: Nocturnes, by Kazuo Ishiguro
• De pianoman (‘The Piano Man‘), by Bernlef
• audiobook: Modelvliegen (‘Model Gliding‘), by Marcel Möring
• [my current book of that moment]
• Dromen van China (The China Lover), by Ian Buruma
• graphic novel: Coraline, by Neil Gaiman
• graphic novel: Persepolis & Persopolis 2, by Marjane Satrapi
• comic: The Best of Mutts, by Patrick McDonnell

There’s just one title I would like to add: Zijde (Silk), by Alessandro Baricco. So if anyone has got a copy available, in Dutch or English..?

Buying graphic novels for the upcoming read-a-thon was a first for me! I figured it would be great for variety. But the funny thing is I can hardly wait to start reading them now! I should keep myself from picking them up first thing on THE Day

My mailbox really had to work overtime this week: I also received my three online Japanese book group reads yesterday!

• I Am a Cat (Wagahai wa Neko dearu 1905), by Natsume Sōseki — readalong, part 1 TBR before November 15th
• The Old Capital (Koto 1962), by Yasunari Kawabata — TBR before November 30th
• The Housekeeper and the Professor (Hakase no aishi ta sūshiki 2003), by Yoko Ogawa — TBR before January 30th 2010

Next week I hope to have finished John Steinbeck’s The Grapes of Wrath… I’ll see you then!

Cover of Persepolis (Pantheon, 2007); image courtesy of shelflove.wordpress.com

When I saw the film version of Marjane Satrapi’s graphic novel Persepolis, it was a pretty rad time to be a feminist moviegoer. In the last month of 2007 and the first month of 2008, this movie came out, along with Juno and 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days. Having just completed a girls’ studies course, I was ecstatic that three different movies, each from a different country, were released with complex, resilient protagonists who were girls and young women.

Two of these movies earned Oscar nominations a few months later. Juno won Best Screenplay. Persepolis was nominated for Best Animated Feature, but unfortunately lost to Ratatouille. 4 Months, which documents the harrowing day of one college student trying to procure an illegal abortion for her roommate during the last years of Nicolae Ceauşescu’s in Romania, won the Palme D’Or at Cannes earlier in 2007, but failed to receive any nominations. For some reason. Perhaps it escaped nomination as a technicality, but I don’t understand why no one, particularly writer-director Cristian Mungiu or lead actress Anamaria Marinca, got any Academy recognition. Perhaps because it lacked the allegorical importance of No Country For Old Men or There Will Be Blood and cut to very real (and tremendously gendered) issues facing real people in the real world, many of whom reside in developing nations. 

But it is really no matter. No Country, There Will Be Blood, Julian Schnabel’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly, and Todd Haynes’s I’m Not There were but more examples of what a very fine time this particular two-month period was for movies. But 4 Months was easily my favorite movie of that year. The movie whose source material will be the focus of this post was a very close second.

Having seen the movie upon its U.S. release, some context has changed considerably upon revisiting Satrapi’s autobiography about coming of age inside and outside of Iran from the late 70s to the early 90s, a time period where the country witnessed the fall of the Shah (aided by the United States), the swift and crushing oppression of its citizens by Islamic extremists, a devastating eight-year war with Iraq, and the neighboring country’s launch of the Persian Gulf War. In late 2007, we were still living under the Bush Administration, so the country’s positioning as part of the ”axis of evil” was in my mind, but being pretty ignorant about the country’s political history and our involvement with it past the Iran-Contra Affair, Bush’s branding of the country read more as a promise that the United States were, in fact, going to try and spread democracy by force to all of the Middle East, snatching up its real or imagined WMDs and drain its oil resources in the process. And I knew about President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and was disgusted by his views on the Holocaust and heartened by the student protests around his adminstration, but was not yet aware of just what a dangerous despot he is.     

This was, of course, before this year’s highly controversial presidential election, which Ahmadinejad “won” by a suspiciously high margain over rival candidate Mir-Hossein Mousavi, an Independent reformist. At the time, what seemed more present in our minds in the states was what Twitter was doing to help cover and contextualize the civic protests and how quickly mainstream broadcast news was going to incorporate the still-emergent micro-blogging site’s Tweets into their 24-hour cycle, regardless of how accurate they were. 

As a result, I was a little jaded by the “Twitter users coverage of the Iran election is going to change news reporting” angle many seemed to be taking and instead wanted to know more about how the election was fraudulent, why certain people (specifically journalists, protesters, students, and politicians) were being arrested, what the stakes were, who was doing a good job covering this news story, and, most importantly, what circumstances led to the current iteration of Iran. Remembering that local branches of Barnes & Noble were donating proceeds to the Paramount upon purchase last weekend, shilling out my money to the big box chain for the sake of preserving a historical movie theater seemed as a good an opportunity to buy the book that may provide answers.

And, I’ll be honest. Reading the book left me with more questions than anything else (a similar feeling came over me when reading Khaled Hosseini’s The Kite Runner and A Thousand Splendid Suns, two books whose timelines stretch past the 70s-90s, but contain a considerable overlap in terms of time with Persepolis, focusing on what was going on with ordinary people in Afghanistan, another contentious Middle Eastern country that borders Iran). It was hard not to check some ugly American tendencies I have toward Islamic traditions — particularly toward its views on marriage, sexuality, gender politics, and dress. At the same time, I was incredulous of how pro-West rhetoric and ideology, alongside our smuggled trinkets of popular culture, could possibly reform a nation, or at least save a person.

Luckily, Satrapi is skeptical of both and, like me and other feminists from all over the world, has a lot to negotiate. She grapples with these issues head-on. She argues with teachers against the physical restrictions and societal double standards that come with the hijab and the burka (sidenote: I know that Faegheh Shirazi, who teaches Middle Eastern Studies at UT and rejects traditional Islamic dress, has written and taught courses on gender and clothing in the Middle East, but any other suggestions for further reading are welcome). She watches her female peers grow up to only want marriage and children, in large part because these are the only things their nation’s leaders believe define their worth. Particularly poignant for this co-habitator, she regrets getting married to a man named Reza because they could not legally live together (or even walk the street) without proof of marriage, dissolving the marriage and leaving for France.

Marjane and friends reject the hijab; image courtesy of rand.org

Satrapi is a smart rebel who reads constantly, thinks clearly, and never backs down from an argument. She yells at authority figures who bully her or deny that there are any political prisoners in Iran after learning about the loss of her grandfather, who was son and prime minister to the ousted king (a tie that Satrapi suggests is not uncommon).

College student Satrapi damns the man; image courtesy of butterfliesandbears.wordpress.com

Luckily for Satrapi, she gets through all of this with the love and support of her politically aware and resistant parents, their friends, and one rad paternal grandma. Not so luckily, she also knows and meets lots of folks who suffered for speaking up, speaking out, or just living in the wrong house during an aerial bombing. Something tells me that many Iranians could recount similar tales of horror.

Satrapi also learns that the ways of the West are not always ideal, either. While a pre-pubescent in Iran, she hangs Iron Maiden posters on her wall her parents smuggle from a vacation in Turkey when the government lifted border restrictions. She defiantly walks around her neighborhood, blaring Kim Wilde’s “Kids in America” from her Walkman while sporting a Michael Jackson pin. But noting that their daughter’s rebelliousness is hardly a phase and that escalating conflict with Iraq could mean the imprisonment or death of their mouthy teen, her parents send her to live with a friend of her mother’s in Vienna.

Still from the film; image courtesy of whatsontv.co.uk

Satrapi finishes high school, barely scraping by as she finds odd jobs, dates dumb boys, takes a lot of drugs, and runs into authority figures who want her to tow the line and behave. She also falls in with a group of radical misfits who dabble with nihilism, Marxism, hair dye, and punk. While Satrapi initially finds a home with these punks and new wave kids, she soon discovers their privilege has made them cowardly, pretentious, self-righteous, entitled, and lazy. Her outsider status also makes her cool, her Austrian peers clearly jealous by what she has seen and experienced without really processing the weight of it between drags off their joints and skims through their copies of the Marx-Engels Reader in their well-appointed bedrooms. It’s small wonder that, when Satrapi finally returns home to Iran after she finishes high school homeless and afflicted with bronchitis, she washes off a punk stencil from her bedroom wall. And while she’s sad that her mother gave away her cassette tapes, she probably wasn’t going to listen to them anyway. She would’ve kept the Kim Wilde tape, however.

So, ultimately, I do feel this revisit of Persepolis helped clarify my feelings about the state of Iran. It also left me with several questions and a need to know more. Ultimately, though, it left me with the sense of universality that exists between people, especially tough, smart women and girls, while at the same time recognizing the particularities that inform their realities. And continues to inform them. Back in June, Satrapi spoke out against the election results with filmmaker Mohsen Makhmalba. Something tells me that her grandmother, who passed away shortly after Satrapi moved to France at the close of the book, would be proud.

Quality time with grandma; image courtesy of rwor.org

Il disegno del mondo

La Malesia di Hugo Pratt, la Praga di Vittorio Giardino, l’Iran di Marjane Satrapi, il Libano di David Polonsky.
A cura di Ugo G. Caruso, Alessandra Mauro e Antonio Politano.

Un viaggio a fumetti con tavole e fotografie dei luoghi legati ad autori e personaggi della “letteratura disegnata”, realizzato in collaborazione con Rizzoli Lizard e le agenzie fotografiche Contrasto e Magnum Photos.

Quattro disegnatori. Due tra i più grandi maestri del fumetto italiano e internazionale, Hugo Pratt e Vittorio Giardino: il primo presente con tavole tratte dal suo Sandokan (l’inedito del 1969 perduto e ritrovato, pubblicato per la prima volta nel 2009), il secondo con oltre 30 opere originali dedicate al suo personaggio Jonas Fink. E nomi nuovi come l’iraniana Marjane Satrapi, autrice della graphic novel, divenuta film, Persepolis, 2008, e l’israeliano David Polonsky autore con Ari Folman di Valzer con Bashir, 2008, nato dal film di animazione acclamato a Cannes.

Sei fotografi della Magnum Photos. L’Iran di Abbas ad accompagnare i disegni di Marjane Satrapi, il Libano di Paolo Pellegrin accanto al lungo viaggio nella memoria di David Polonsky, la Praga degli anni ‘50 di René Burri e della Primavera del ‘68 di Ian Berry per Vittorio Giardino, le genti e la natura della Malesia di Stuart Franklin e Jean Gaumy per Hugo Pratt.

Dal 24 settembre – 25 ottobre 2009
Spazio “fontana” – via Milano 13
Ingresso libero

Disegno del mondo