The Complete Persepolis - Dark Publications

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Product Description
Here, in one volume: Marjane Satrapi's best-selling, internationally acclaimed memoir-in-comic-strips.

Persepolis is the story of Satrapi's unforgettable childhood and coming of age within a large and loving family in Tehran during the Islamic Revolution; of the contradictions between private life and public life in a country plagued by political upheaval; of her high school years in Vienna facing the trails of adolescence far from her family; of her homecoming--both sweet and terrible; and, finally, of her self-imposed exile from her beloved homeland. It is the chronicle of a girlhood and adolescence at once outrageous and familiar, a young life entwined with the history of her country yet filled with the universal trials and joys of growing up.

Edgy, searingly observant, and candid, often heartbreaking but threaded throughout with raw humor and hard-earned wisdom--Persepolis is a stunning work from one of the most highly regarded, singularly talented graphic artists at work today.

Customer Reviews: Read 26 more reviews...

2 out of 5 stars

Not what I expected January 12, 2008
24 out of 65 found this review helpful

Last night I had the opportunity to watch Persepolis, a movie based on graphic novels by French based Iranian author Marjane Satrapi that I had read before as well...

Overall, the movie was not bad although it had several historical errors and many shortcomings which I am going to talk about in this entry. If you're informed enough about Iran, this can be a refreshing look at things but if not, you got to read a bit more before seeing this movie.

The first 20 minutes of the film is to bash the former Shah of Iran and his late father Reza Shah the great as most ex-Communists and leftists do these days and mislead the viewers to believe that Reza Shah the great was a product of British control over Iran at the time which is an utter nonsense and it just goes to repeat the same old cliche of conspiracy theorists in the Iranian society. Yes, the vast majority of Iranians still believe that British had something to do with installing Reza Shah to power and they're unable to see the facts of the past and accept that Reza Shah was not installed by the Brits, yet he disliked the colonial powers and was an extreme nationalist who cared for nothing but his own shattered country. The other shortcoming of this animated film was to repeat the same terrible anti-Shah nonsense that you can hear in most Marxist-Islamist circles today. The first 20-30 minutes were badly wasted to tell the clueless western viewer that the Shah was wrong to prosecute the Stalin supported Azeri separatists of Iran in 1946-47 who had orders from Kremlin to disintegrate Iran from within. Yes, according to Ms. Satrapi's accounts, it was okay for a Stalinist group to seize parts of Iran but it was wrong for the government to stop them. One has to remember that Ms. Satrapi basically comes from a Communist family where his uncles and father are/were proudly anti-Shah Marxist activists.

What disturbed me most through out the entire movie was the fact that author really failed to mention the source of oppression in post-revolution Iran which is/was Islamofascism and the mullahs who enforce that ideology. No mention of Khomeini in the movie is a mystery to me. Ms. Satrapi portrayed the late Shah as a commie-hating brutal dictator, yet she definitely failed to show who the real evil was represented by in post-revolution Iran. Yeah, I saw the moral police behavior towards western clothing or late night parties but who enforced that? Satrapi failed to tell the viewer. If I wasn't from that country or didn't know much, I'd not be able to guess who enforced a ban on alcohol or western music.

The graphic novels which this animated movie is based on are truly reflective of the lives of many Iranians who like Ms. Satrapi suffered a a lot but again one has to remember that the story told by the author represents a tiny minority of the Iranian people. And the novels are the memoirs of one specific person and don't really tell us the whole story and I, for one, didn't expect her to talk about my story or stories of others. Persepolis is the story of Marjane Satrapi and for that, it is nothing special. She got to go to Europe because her family could afford it while me and tons of people like me had to suffer under the war of the cities and put up with the Islamic regime oppressive system. She got to leave Iran in mid 1990s again when she got depressed after a short time living under the mullah's rule but millions and millions of us had no choice but to stay there and soldier on. Persepolis animated movie is just about Ms. Satrapi's complicated life and has nothing to do with the vast majority of the people held hostage by the Islamic regime of Iran. Kudos to her for making money by selling her story but it really doesn't change much for those who still live inside of the country and have to suffer a great deal due to the mistakes Ms. Satrapi's communist father and uncles made in pre-revolution eras. You need to be informed about the history of Iran before watching any Iranian related movie, otherwise you might run a risk of being misled or misinformed.

At the end, I'd give Persepolis 2.5 stars out of 5. It doesn't get any better!

5 out of 5 stars

A Phenomenon In More Ways Than One December 24, 2007
23 out of 25 found this review helpful

As a child Marjane Satrapi lived through the 1979 Iranian Revolution and its aftermath.

Included here are Satrapi's internationally-acclaimed graphic novels, PERSEPOLIS: The STORY Of A CHILDHOOD and PERSEPOLIS 2: The STORY Of A RETURN. Combining clear analysis with a sharp sense of humor, the first volume tells the story of Marjane and her family's experiences during the final years of the Monarchy, its downfall, and the subsequent rise of Khomeini and the Islamic Republic. A more personal volume, PERSEPOLIS 2 follows Marjane's student years in Vienna and her later return to Iran.

Together with Vincent Paronnaud, Satrapi also co-wrote and co-directed the animated film version.

5 out of 5 stars

Couldn't put it down November 19, 2007
10 out of 13 found this review helpful

It's been a long time since a book has affected me as much as Persepolis. I think it's the point of view, of a young girl growing into a young adult, that makes the story so poignant. How we come to our beliefs, how our beliefs sometimes shift, how we find ourselves making choices that don't necessarily reflect those beliefs: all of this and more is eloquently written and drawn in this memoir. If everyone who thinks people in the Middle East, or all Muslims, are our enemies would read this book, perhaps we would be able to focus on the REAL enemies of our democracy.

5 out of 5 stars

A Powerful Autobiographical Tale in Graphic Novel Form January 15, 2008
10 out of 10 found this review helpful

THE COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS brings together in one softbound volume two graphic novels published earlier in English (translated from French): PERSEPOLIS 1 - THE STORY OF A CHILDHOOD, and PERSEPOLIS 2 - THE STORY OF A RETURN. As a single volume, Ms. Satrapi's work reads as a seamless story of an Iranian woman's maturation from a young girl in the Shah's (and Ayatollah Khomeini's) Iran to her high school years in Austria, back to the Iran attacked by Saddam Hussein and then transformed into a fundamentalist Islamic state, and finally back again to Europe as a young adult. The book's title is borrowed from the name of ancient Persia's ceremonial capital, dating back some 2,500 years, although Persepolis is in fact the Greek translation of the original Persian name, Parsa.

The story is strictly autobiographical, rendered as a memoir of childhood and young adulthood. Satrapi begins her story at age ten, the daughter of well-educated and well-off parents who put a premium on their daughter's religious and academic independence. Marjane's parents prod their pre-adolescent daughter toward a liberal education and encourage her to speak out. However, being a rebel against oppression in Iran leads inevitably to trouble and expulsion from school. Her parents recourse is to pack young Marjane off to Austria, isolated and alone in a foreign and far more secular culture. A series of mostly negative experiences leads her back to her homeland and an unsuccessful marriage during the early years of Iran's fundamentalist revolution with its growing religious oppression. When the young adult Marjane and her parents finally realize that her future lies not in Iran but in Europe, she heads off to France where she still lives today.

Ms. Satrapi characterizes herself as the perennial outsider wherever she lives. As a young girl, political and religious events contradict her upbringing and isolate her from the accepted beliefs and behaviors. The author conveys her childhood desperation by repeated depictions of herself talking to an ancient, white-bearded God, even cradled in his arms. She is even more the outsider in Austria, forever fumbling in her discoveries of Western culture only to become enslaved by some of its worst features. Returning to Iran after her high school years, Marjane is too Westernized to be Iranian, yet still too Iranian to feel Western. The author's journey to self-discovery and finding her true home serves as the core of her story, punctuated by her departures and arrivals. In fact, some of the most dramatic scenes in THE COMPLETE PERSEPOLIS take place at airports.

Satrapi's black-and-white cartooning emphasizes contrast over detail. Indeed, her drawings of people are exceedingly simplified, lacking in all except the basic features necessary to portray a character. This simplicity works, as it stands in stark contrast to the complexity of Iran's constantly changing social, political, and religious structures as well as the complexity of the author's own life and the choices she faced. These minimalist renderings, hardly more detailed than Schulz's "Peanuts" characters, create an even greater dissonance when their childlike simplicity clashes with the horrors of war and the Iranian government's seizures and executions of many of its citizens. The reader is so effectively lulled into this seemingly benign, comic book world that Satrapi's occasional dropping of an expletive into her character's thoughts or words has the force of a slap in the face. When young Marjane returns home to see the dead, braceleted arm of one of her neighborhood friends (killed by one of Saddam Hussein's missiles) extending from her wrecked home, the author resorts to the powerful simplicity of a completely black panel captioned, "No scream in the world could have relieved my suffering and my anger."

There is a natural temptation to compare PERSEPOLIS to Art Spiegelman's MAUS I and MAUS II. However, I believe the Maus books are sui generis, allegorical tales whose use of mice and cats puts Spiegelman's books in a class of their own. By contrast, Satrapi's PERSEPOLIS novels are autobiographical volumes rendered in illustrated form to trace an Iranian woman's struggle to find herself while still loving a country from which she feels irretrievably estranged. Satrapi's and Spiegelman's work complement one another and demonstrate the emotional power graphical novels are increasingly finding ways to achieve.

5 out of 5 stars

Freedom has a price. December 8, 2007
9 out of 10 found this review helpful

This book collects Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood and Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return. Both books are graphic novels telling the true story of the author's life. Book one tells the story of her girlhood in Iran and ends when she leaves Iran to go to a boarding school in Austria. Book two picks up where book one left off, and tells the rest of her story up to the point where she leaves Iran for the second and last time. This is a great, moving story. I found myself empathizing with this girl, even though she comes from a culture nothing like mine and we have nothing in common. It obviously wasn't easy growing up a progressive girl in a represive culture. I could go on and on about the virtues of this book, but it's better if you just read it and find out for yourself. Or see the "major motion picture". (aren't all motion pictures "major"? at least according to their publicity.)

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