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PERSEPOLIS 2 by Marjane Satrapi
($17.95,
Pantheon Books)
Review by Sean McGurrAlmost a year ago, I reviewed
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's touching story about growing up in war-torn Iran during the early '80s. She learns much about her country and herself in the course of the novel before being sent by her parents to Europe to escape the repressive society.
Persepolis 2 picks up Satrapi's story in Europe and winds its way back to Iran. Like its predecessor, it is an immensely readable book.
By the second panel of the book, I was completely drawn into Satrapi's world despite having almost nothing in common with her. She is sent away from the friend where her mother sent her to stay to go to a boarding school run by nuns. She has to share a bedroom for the first time and it is with a girl who doesn't speak the same language as her. Despite being an Iranian living in Europe in a strange situation, Satrapi adapts and makes friends. But she never truly feels as if she belongs.
After the war with Iraq is over, Satrapi returns to Iran to live with her parents. But back in her home country, she still feels out of place. She doesn't have the shared experience of the war that her friends and family have, and they see her as Westernized. Her mixed emotions about all of this depress her and eventually lead her to attempt suicide. When the suicide attempt fails, she turns her life around, goes to university, and gets married. But there is still the conflict between how she'd like to live her life and the fundamentalist government that wants to control its citizens.
Satrapi's simple artistic style and fairly standard page layouts take nothing away from the book and, in fact, make it easily accessible to any reader. The episodic nature of the book and Satrapi's unique voice and tone make it a hard book to put down. It is a book that should be read by a wide audience for all it has to say.
Note: The book I reviewed had a couple of production errors: pages 29-60 were repeated twice and pages 61-92 were missing; also towards the end of the book some pages (170, 175, 183 are examples) didn't reproduce well. Buyer be warned.
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