The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi

Persepolis is a memoir in graphic novel format. it is completely biographical. and it does many things for me. on the surface, it tells a very compelling story about a very compelling character and i like that a lot. it also makes a terrific picture of life in Iran after the Islamic Revolution because the story is all about growing up in Iran during and after the Islamic Revolution.

Marjane, or Marji as she is called in the book, is born to a family of modernists. her parents participate in the demonstrations and protests against the Shah that brought about his abdication. however, it seems that what replaced the Shah was much worse, or at the very least, no better and they found themselves opposed to the new government as well.

so, they raised their only daughter to be a free-thinking person, but her outspokenness eventually got her in trouble in Iran, so her parents sent her to Austria at fourteen. she spent four years in Vienna before returning to Iran, but in Iran after four years' absence, she finds that much has changed, most startlingly, in herself. she finds that she cannot fit in anywhere: in the west, she is Iranian, in Iran she has become westernized. this feeling of homelessness leads to depression and she tries to commit suicide by taking a drug overdose while her parents are on vacation. miraculously, she survives and decides to 'take her life in hand.'

and just that is three quarters of the novel, so i won't give away the ending. what i liked about the book is that it showed a lot of what Iran is like. i've always wanted to visit Iran because it is always a very interesting and conflicted part of the world, even in my own lifetime, but especially throughout history. so, in this book, i felt like i was being given a guided tour of Iran, its culture and ideology. that was fascinating.

also, i found the author's own political and ideological insights to be quite astute. and i really appreciated that. i appreciated her freethinkingness and how she embraced being marginalized, no matter where she was--she was marginalized in vienna as she was in iran. but she didn't resist mainstream culture just for the sake of resisting mainstream culture; what i appreciated most was her insight into the thoughtlessness of society, how so many people--both the religious fanatics and the liberals who resist the Islamic Revolution--can dispense with thinking simply because it's a more convenient way to live, they just do what they do without thinking about why they do it. she's also very honest about finding herself living thoughtlessly on several occasions and about how easy it is to dispense with thinking. to me, she showed her life as a constant struggle to be a thinking person, and she often gets encouragement from her parents and grandmother, who teach her think for herself and who sometimes lovingly show her when she is not.

that's why it stung so much when, at the end of the book, she makes some decisions, like the ones that lead to her marriage and ultimate divorce, and defends them with the same unthinking kind of logic that everyone else does. but i'll save that for another post.

in conclusion, i loved this book. it was an education without seeming like one.