Volume 52, Number 6 · April 7, 2005
A Double Life in Black and White
By Patricia Storace
Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood
by Marjane Satrapi
Pantheon, 153 pp., $17.95c
Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
by Marjane Satrapi
Pantheon, 187 pp., $17.95
The two volumes of Persepolis, the implacably witty and fearless 'graphic memoir' of the Iranian illustrator Marjane Satrapi, relate through an inseparable fusion of cartoon images and verbal narrative the story of a privileged young girl's childhood experience of Iran's revolution of 1979, its eight-year war with Iraq, her exile to Austria during her high school years, and her subsequent experience as a university student, young artist, and wife in Tehran after her return to Iran from Europe in 1998. That Persepolis 1, a book in which it is almost impossible to find an image distinguished enough to consider an independent piece of visual art, and equally difficult to find a sentence which in itself surpasses the serviceable, emerges as a work so fresh, absorbing, and memorable is an extraordinary achievement.
Review, 5366 words
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