I intentionally avoided the movie version of this book. I wanted my reading experience to be unspoiled, even by trailers. Now, having read the book, I shall have to go see the movie.

I am the same age as Marjane Satrapi. As I reflect the events of this book, I remember my perception of events in Iran: the revolution, the hostage crisis, the war with Iraq. Having lived in Italy from 1977-79, I feel a little closer to these events than I would have, had I been "buried" in American concerns at the time. My father was a military man, and we were living in a foreign country. While I never will know how Satrapi felt about the events in her own country (nor would I want to know), I can at least more closely approximate the emotions she must have felt at the time than if I had been born under other circumstances, in a different place, in a different time.

Persopolis has faint echoes of Maus. Satrapi's voice even sounds similar to Spiegelman's. If you liked Maus you will probably like Persepolis.

I was amazed by how much I didn't know about events in Iran at that time. I consider myself a pretty well-informed person, when it comes to history (flashes MA in History from UW-Madison), but I was unaware of the sheer complexity of the Iranian situation in the late '70 and early '80s. This book doesn't just outline these issues, but goes into some depth regarding how difficult it was for one girl and her family to navigate the fluid and quickly-changing political and social landscape of Iran at the time. There are lots of lessons to be learned here. Satrapi fancied that she would grow up to be a prophet when she was younger, and I think she might well have succeeded with this work. Not a prophet who foretells doom, but a prophet who recounts the errors of the past and puts them up as a warning to the world.

Persepolis was a great city of the ancient world – a vital center of the Achaemenid Empire between 550 and 330 B.C. – and its Persian ruins can be seen today in contemporary Iran. And when Marjane Satrapi titled her 2000 graphic novel Persepolis, she seems to have been giving a nod to the greatness of her country’s past, even as she denounces the cruelties and horrors of its more recent present.

Satrapi, born in 1969, was 10 years old when the Iranian Revolution took place, and therefore she conveys the events set forth in Persepolis with a perspective similar to that of Harper Lee's narrator, Scout, in To Kill a Mockingbird (1960): an adult’s experience-based look back at a child’s movement from a state of naïveté to a state of awareness. No doubt it is with this emphasis in mind that Persepolis is subtitled The Story of a Childhood.

The early part of Persepolis sets forth the cruelty of pre-revolutionary Iran, where the Shah Reza Pahlavi maintained his control of absolute power through his feared SAVAK secret police. Young Marjane learns that her beloved grandfather was a prisoner of the shah’s regime – “Prison had destroyed his health. He had rheumatism. All his life he was in pain” (p. 25) – and it against that historical background that broad-based opposition to the regime begins.

Someone reading Persepolis for the first time may be surprised to learn that the revolutionary opposition to the Shah’s regime included not only Islamists but also well-educated socialists like Marjane’s parents – who eventually find, to their sorrow, that the Islamists have long harboured a detailed plan for seizing full power, locking out the socialists, quashing any moves toward democracy, and implementing a regime every bit as cruel and oppressive as that of the Shah.

The graphic-novel format of Persepolis is central to the book’s success; the relatively simple, thick lines of many of the illustrations give them a childlike quality, and reinforce the idea that these dramatic moments from Iranian history are being presented from a child’s perspective. When, for instance, the family receives a post-revolutionary visit from two friends, a husband and wife who have just been released from prison, the evening is given over to a recollection of the various tortures that the two ex-prisoners suffered and witnessed while in prison.

The tortures, because they are presented from the young Marjane’s perspective, and because they are depicted through childlike drawings, somehow take on a particular horror – more, perhaps, than if they were presented in “realistic” full color. Satrapi, looking back on how she learned of these atrocities, wryly remarks that “My parents were so shocked…that they forgot to spare me this experience” (p. 51).

The stark black-and-white illustrations emphasize the oppression involved in the Islamist government’s adoption of a policy compelling all Iranian women to wear the chador. As Satrapi chronicles, "morals police" roamed the streets of post-revolutionary Tehran, threatening with physical or sexual violence any woman who dared not to wear the veil. Once the work of the "morals police" is done, the women whose individuality once showed through in their clothing and hairstyle now are all made to look exactly alike – their blank, pale, carefully expressionless faces framed in a sea of black. Satrapi even archly points out how the “modern woman” of post-revolutionary Iran would “show [her] opposition to the regime by letting a few hairs show” (p. 75) under her chador.

The horrors of the Iran-Iraq War of 1980-88 take center stage in the second half of the book – and we see devoutly religious Muslim characters start to question their faith, under a government that has ruthlessly exploited the Islamic religion for political purposes. A friend of Marjane’s mother, Mrs. Nasrine, describes how her 14-year-old son is being recruited as a soldier, offered a “key to paradise” to wear around his neck into battle, with promises “that in paradise, there will be plenty of food, women, and houses made of gold and diamonds” (p. 100). Mrs. Nasrine, anguished, says, “All my life, I’ve been faithful to the religion. If it’s come to this…well, I can’t believe in anything anymore…” (p. 99)

And a couple of pages later – because the graphic-novel format allows the artist to manipulate specifics like panel size for dramatic effect – Satrapi gives us a large panel that shows ten child soldiers, in silhouette, keys around their necks, being blown sky-high by an explosion. The caption sums up with laconic eloquence the cruel cynicism with which the Iranian revolutionary regime consigned children to a violent death: “The key to paradise was for poor people. Thousands of young kids, promised a better life, exploded on the minefields with keys around their necks. Mrs. Nasrine’s son managed to avoid that fate, but lots of other kids from his neighborhood didn’t” (p. 102).

Late in Persepolis, the reader learns that Marjane has a potential way out – a chance to leave Iran for Austria. Because she once went to summer camp in France, her parents posit that she will be prepared for life in the West – and they sense that this may be young Marjane’s last chance to get out from under the oppression of the Islamist regime. On the night before her departure from Tehran, young Marjane cuddles with her grandmother in bed; and the framing of the image – with grandmother and grand-daughter cuddled together in emotional warmth, against a backdrop of absolute blackness – reinforces how this is a brief moment of comfort in the face of an uncertain future. The grandmother’s advice to Marjane is eloquent and moving:

In life, you’ll meet a lot of jerks. If they hurt you, tell yourself that it’s because they’re stupid. That will help keep you from reacting to their cruelty. Because there is nothing worse than cruelty and vengeance…Always keep your dignity and be true to yourself. (p. 152)

On a note of mingled hope, sorrow, and apprehension, Marjane Satrapi leaves Iran for the last time.

In a 2002 afterword to Persepolis, Satrapi writes that since the 1979 revolution, “this old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from the truth. That is why writing Persepolis was so important to me. I believe that an entire nation should not be judged by the wrongdoings of a few extremists.”

Composed in a spirit of mingled love and grief, Persepolis provides a powerful look back at a crucial time in history, and tells the story of a brave little girl who sought a way to fight back against a regime that sought to deny her personhood – and found her way of fighting back, through artistic expression.

این رمان کمیک به شیوه اتوبیوگرافی بوده و شخصیت اصلی رمان که راوی داستان است، دختری ایرانی است به نام مرجان. مرجان دختری است که در جریان انقلاب ایران و بحران جنگ ایران و عراق به تشویق خانواده از کشور خارج شده و به اتریش می‌رود.این کتاب‌ها روایت جنگ و بحران‌های مذهبی و سنتی جامعه ایران و حوادث انقلاب و جنگ هستند و تاریخ دههٔ بعد از جنگ ایران را از دید وی بیان می‌کنند

میخواستم کتاب را نقد کنم که چرا چنین تصویری از ایران به دست داده است بویژه وقتی از خاطرات مدرسه و ناراضی بودن از حجاب سخن میگفت اما بعد فهمیدممن که زن نیستم و نمیتوانم آن را بفهممحتما توصیه میکنم این کتاب را بویژه زنان ایرانی بخوانند بیشتر از دوساعت وقت نمیگیرد و به فارسی نیز ترجمه و در اینترنت منتشر شده است.خاطرات مرجان ساتراپی از دوران کودکی اش مرا تحت تاثیر قرار داد

Δυο ώρες διαθέσιμες δίπλα στη δημοτική βιβλιοθήκη μπορούν να είναι άκρως δημιουργικές!

Σοκαριστικά αληθινό κόμικς που περιγράφει τα χρόνια της Ισλαμικής επανάστασης και την αλλαγή που αυτή επέβα��λε...

Δυστυχώς τέτοιες "αλλαγές" εξακολουθούν να είναι σύγχρονες...

As a Persian girl who has lived all her life in Iran, I'm not sure what to write and also I am not sure how I feel about people reading this book to get to know
About Iran.

A very bleak black & white tale of life in wartime Iran. Marjane's illustrations are dreary reminders that what you experienced in childhood will shape you forever--her story is one that is too damn real to possibly ignore. An extraordinary feat in the shape of lovable 2-D comics.

I really enjoyed this.

Marjane Satrapi and I are the same age. But while I was playing baseball and going to the library and enjoying an otherwise uneventful life in suburban America in the 70s and early 80s, Marjane was – doing a lot of the same kid stuff in Tehran.

There was also a social and political revolution in Iran that caused cultural upheavals and made her childhood a sad, dangerous time.

But it’s the normality of her childhood memoirs juxtaposed with the political revolution that made this work so well.

Many of us recall the Islamic revolution as our TV sets showed bearded men, angry and burning flags, taking over the country and imprisoning American diplomats for months.

What Satrapi shows us is that her country was and is still made up of more than just angry bearded men. The black and white graphic novel also shows us scenes of children playing with the religious veils they were instructed to wear, and having fun with laws they neither understood or cared for, and meeting the calamitous events with humanity, and loyalty to family and even humor. The image I am left with is a girl, growing to be a young woman, who was not an extremist, but rather a survivor within a revolutionary nightmare.

The author does not sugarcoat the ugly realties that she and her family endured, and there is much sadness and even horror described here – friends and relatives died or had their lives torn apart by the revolution and the resulting Islamic extremist theocracy. What stands out, though, was Marjane’s steadfast refusal to change who she was in spite of the dangerous times she lived in.

This book also explains the complexity of the times. Too frequently media presents an overly simplified version of events, all too often a binary depiction of a complicated reality that does not adequately portray the nuances and complexities of a situation. Iran had a monarchy taken over by another form of monarchy, that was in need of reform. Marjane’s parents were Marxists who wanted a change but did not agree with the religious revolution they got and so were forced to learn to accept the harsh realities they faced with the oppressive religious regime.

Funny, heartwarming, disturbing, scary and thought provoking, this was a very pleasant surprise and an enjoyable book.

It was a decently told story, with small shining moments. I don't feel it was worth all the hype, though, and I wonder if it would have been such a success if this weren't the perfect time to tap into liberal, anti-war, pro-vaguely-Middle-Eastern sympathies throughout the West.

In the end, I think the marketing was better than the story-telling.

n   “One can forgive but one should never forget.”n

This is the story of Marjane Satrapi as a child growing up during the Islamic Revolution in Iran.
It is so moving and deeply touching to actually see and read what she went through, as well as witnessing the gradual loss of innocence that came with living in war.
I recommend this to everyone. It shows a different side of the history of Iran - one that I knew very little about.

Brought me closer to my dad and his family and a history I didn’t know much about. I wish we could always learn about history, politics, and (most importantly) what ordinary people endure, through this format

با صرف نظر از اینکه خارجی ها چه دیدگاهی رو نسبت ب ایران و ایرانی با خوندن این کتاب پیدا میکن..
باید بگم که بر خلاف مصور بودن و بچگانه به نظر رسیدن کتاب واقعا کتاب سنگینی بود...
برای بار اول با یه نظر متفاوت درباره انقلاب و .. آشنا شدم
و افسوس میخورم که هیچ وقت نمیفهمم کدوم یکی از این نظر ها و روایت ها راست بوده...

Smart, funny, painful and self-ironic. Highly recommended.