mydarlingcurse.com

i’ve been going back and forth in my mind as to what really to call this book. i wouldn’t say it’s a graphic novel, since, in my mind, graphic novels have more of a mythology behind them. also, the artwork in graphic novels helps to tell the story, part of why we read graphic novels is too see the art. the pictures and they story go hand in hand.

Persepolis on the other hand has been marketed and called a “Comic Strip Memoir” since it deals with the real life of the author - who simply chose to tell her tale in comic strip format. the art work is good, since Satrapi herself is a graphic artist. but in my mind, graphic novels are more 3-D and Persepolis doesn’t want to be more than what it is….a memoir told in comic strip format.

and while The Bitches categorized this as a graphic novel, i think that’s wrong. a novel is fictional prose, while a memoir is a personal account. the pictures should have nothing to do with it. so i’ve convinced myself - comic strip memoir.

now a word on that memoir - while reading Persepolis i became grossly aware of how ignorant i am of middle eastern culture. Satrapi tells her tale of growing up in revolutionary Iran, and while i remember hostages and being afraid of the Ayatollah, i was a kid at the time, and foreign affairs didn’t really concern me.

but to read how a young girl had to completely change her ways, because of a new regime in the country, to do things, silly things, just because you were told. well that sparked in me a certain anarchist kinship.

i felt some what lazy reading how Satrapi spent her teen years. while i was guzzling mountian dew and eating cheetos and pop-tarts, she was reading philosophy. something i was only forced to do in college. with our western age of cable TV, no one my age was interested in what the government was doing. since it didn’t affect our daily lives, what did we care.

on the other hand, Satrapi was affected constantly with government regulations of what to wear and where to go. that i cannot imagine.

there were parts of her story that i didn’t find all that interesting, it didn’t seem that different from other young girls’ tales of growing up, fighting with your parents, listening to rock and roll, and waiting to be loved. it was the setting that was intriguing, or rather the story within the setting. and by setting i mean Iran and the comic strip.