2005-12-19 - 8:07 p.m. - Persepolis 2, by Marjane Satrapi
Persepolis was an absolutely riveting graphic novel, the autobiographical story of growing up in Iran in the years of turmoil leading up to and including the fundamentalist takeover in 1979, and the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s. Its clean-lined, almost childlike drawing style helped soften the brutality of the events (as in Maus) while keeping the experience of the little girl at the center of the story. The window provided into the strangeness of everything was fascinating, and Satrapi did an excellent job of conveying how much her child's eyes saw everything as both terrible/fucked up and just the way things were.
Ultimately she managed an escape to Austria in her early teens, which is where Persepolis 2 picks up; it details Satrapi's coming of age in Vienna and her subsequent return to Iran for her young adulthood. The level of immediate danger is considerably lower and the subject matter is no longer the response of a child to revolution and war, but the way such a child grows into a woman. It's a less suspenseful book, but it's still compelling, as Satrapi finds herself alienated both in Europe and in Iran, as a foreigner in one country and a decadent Westerner in the other. Her struggle to find people who can understand her unique experience is, in the book's second half, inter-mixed with the struggle to re-adapt to the fundamentalist regime, which has cooled off considerably during their absence but still presents a tremendous danger. At the same time, she depicts in simple, brilliant strokes the way in which so many people she knows have been mollified by the years of fear and repression. So in a nutshell, this book displays the same strengths as the first, although the ending is less clear-cut and the events less viscerally shocking. Both books should be considered strongly recommended reading.