Weeks 10 and 11: Marjane Satrapi's "The Complete Persepolis" (2000)

For our last three books we're jumping into a promising new literary millennium, particularly for multicultural female voices. We'll begin with Marjane Satrapi's The Complete Persepolis, a collected edition of her two-volume graphic narrative, which started publication in 2000 and concluded in 2004.

While in the 1950s, Fredric Wertham condemned comics for their Seduction of the Innocent, by the 1980s — largely due to the groundbreaking impact of Art Spiegelman's Maus (published serially from 1980 to 1991, with its first collected volume coming out in 1986) — they were gradually coming to be seen as not just a valid literary form, but one which can accomplish things that static texts cannot. Nowadays, it's not uncommon to see graphic novels on college reading lists, not to mention entire classes devoted to the genre. It's worth noting, however, that Satrapi disdains the sanitizing nature of that term, preferring that her work be called comic books: "People are so afraid to say the word 'comic.' It makes you think of a grown man with pimples, a ponytail and a big belly. Change it to 'graphic novel' and that disappears. No: it's all comics."

Satrapi's story is unique among our semester's reading, in that it's our first and only non-fiction selection, however any tale, whether true or invented, still needs artistry to help it take shape, so our analysis needn't be any different. Moreover, her coming-of-age story that forms the heart of Persepolis will easily stand alongside many of the similar narratives we've encountered this term. At the same time, while many of those stories are relatively modest in scope, Persepolis is much more closely aligned with The Unbearable Lightness of Being in that its intimate relationships between characters and the reader are set against broader historical currents. In Satrapi's case, the 1979 fundamentalist Iranian Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war (1980–1988) are major factors, along with her student experience in Austria and her eventual life in France, and within these settings, her identity as a woman and a Muslim, her artistic temperament, and the clash between liberal and conservative — as well as (Middle-)Eastern and Western — political and cultural values.

Here's how we'll make our way through Persepolis. Don't sweat the number of pages — graphic novels . . . or rather, comic books . . . read much more quickly than novels:

• Fri. October 27: introduction; "The Veil" to "The F.14s" (3–86)
• Mon. October 30: "The Jewels" to "Tyrol" (87–179)
• Wed. November 1: "The Pill" to "The Veil" (180–245)
• Fri. November 3: "The Return" to "The End"  (246–341)

And here are a few supplemental links for your browsing enjoyment:

• "God Looked Like Marx," Fernanda Eberstadt's New York Times review of Persepolis 1: [link]
• Boris Kachka reviews Persepolis 2 for New York: [link]
• Andrew D. Arnold reviews Persepolis 1 for Time: [link]
• Publishers Weekly reviews of Persepolis 1 [link] and 2 [link]
• Emma Watson interviews Satrapi about the graphic novel for Vogue: [link]
• Joshua Bearman interviews Satrapi for The Believer: [link]

In 2008, Satrapi directed a film adaption of Persepolis. You'll find the trailer below: