I always enjoyed the first half of Persepolis. Told from Satrapi's perspective, it was a very relatable story about a young child who was swept up by the world events around her, and tried to rebel in very normal, child-like ways. It was very relatable in that abstract sense, even if most of us have not been through a violent revolution. (and even more violent subsequent war with a neighboring state)
The second half of Persepolis was much more difficult for me, and I never know how to feel about it. I think above all else Satrapi deserves a lot of credit for describing herself realistically rather than trying to paint herself as a good person. (not that she was a bad person, but that she didn't shy away from parts of the story that show her in a poor light) I have a lot of respect for her honesty in the second half of the story, however her time in exile in Europe seemed to be one of self-indulgence, meandering, and minor self-destruction. All of which are understandable for someone who has been through such a traumatic turn of events, however it was a bit sad that the young, rebellious child that was so likable did not seem to survive the conflict.
> All of which are understandable for someone who has been through such a traumatic turn of events, however it was a bit sad that the young, rebellious child that was so likable did not seem to survive the conflict.
Great literature does not exist to be heartwarming but to speak fundamental truths, however uncomfortable they are. Persepolis cleaned up as you implicitly desire would cease to be the great work that it is.
I never said I wanted it to be changed. Even if you dislike or disagree with my take, I want to make that really clear; I don't think we should modify art because we find it unpleasant.
There's a parallel in Maus, where the PoV character runs increasingly into his Holocaust survivor's father's racism, even as he explores his father's threading the needle of 20th century Central Europe[1] . He calls his pa out on it, but for his pa the schwarzers aren't people, so there's no "there" there.
If Speigelman had a slightly deeper historical insight he might have drawn the connection between the byzantine precision of American race law and what Hitler had hoped to accomplish in his own "Wild West". Both end products of the secular wave of colonialism, with Hitler's being at least a hundred years too late, held back by the late stage of German nationhood.
Suffering is no guarantor of virtue. Extremes of violence can brutalize not just individuals but entire peoples. Which is why we should not look to victims as prima facie exemplars, but with empathy and deeper understanding.
It seems like you're disappointed it wasn't a modern "noble savage" myth, that it was realistic instead of a fairy tale about a person coming from a bad place to a good place and being happy, wholesome, and free.
This kind of mythology is a pretty big problem in the western world right now as is the kneejerk reaction to it.
That’s a rather uncharitable take on what the poster you’re responding to wrote.
I read Persepolis a few years ago, and it’s hard not to come away with a similar impression. The first part often does resemble a fairy tale of sorts, while the second part is a pretty dark story of teenage alienation. The contrast is jarring, and it goes well beyond “duh nobody’s perfect”.
Both parts are excellent in their own right, and quite unlike any other book I’ve read, but there is indeed something strange going on in part 2. Most readers will remember this, I think.
I’ve always wondered how much of the second part is truth and how much is fiction. That a teenage girl from Iran, living by herself in Central Europe with essentially no local connections, would become a drug dealer to her classmates, and on top of that somehow be let off the hook for it by the headmaster, stretches credibility a little bit.
Idk, I didn’t read this book. But I lived a similar version of that reality in a conservative southern US town. My home life was challenging. I sold drugs and generally was a rebellious troublesome teenager. All the officials in my school and local law enforcement gave me kind slaps on the wrist compared to what they could/should have. I had to assume they were trying to get me to a point of adulthood without having life ruining consequences weighing me down. I straightened up by around 17-18 but there were certainly a few times between 14-17 I could have been charged for adult felony crimes and was let off the hook, never even spent a night in a juvenile detention facility but I was made to flush a lot of drugs down some toilets a time or two. I think it used to be more common to let kids figure things out for themselves. I don’t think the similar levels of leniency would occur, it’s all zero tolerance.
A foreign student who is afraid of returning to her home country sounds like an ideal low-level drug dealer. They are legally vulnerable because they are afraid of being expelled from the country, and they have access to lots of potential buyers in their fellow students. And someone who is new and is looking for friends is more easily approached and recruited.
I'm from Vienna (admittedly younger) but it seems believable. The place she picks up the drugs in the comic is "Café Camera" which is clearly a reference to "Camera Club" which was well-known for this in the 80s and 90s.
Has there been any study that analyses the frequency of natural death of one shortly after death of his/her partner. How different is that compared to what one would expect assuming statistical independence and based image and health adjusted mortality curves.
That's always a possibility but I've seen my Grandpa die of a broken heart after my Grandma died. The night of her funeral he asked his children if they thought someone could die of a broken heart and after that it took him less than a year to go himself. I'd never considered that saying to be true until then but I watched it happen.
> We are focusing on the small details and hiding the misery in the world. Look at the smoker and we miss global warming, war, and the crap we eat--not the bad guys but smoking. I smoke and they talk about cancer, I eat and they talk about cholesterol, I make love, it's AIDS. Before AIDS and cholesterol and cancer there's the pleasure of making love and eating and smoking. I have to die someday, so if the thing that gave me pleasure all of my life kills me instead of me going under a truck, that's fine. Besides, why should I live so that when I die I give fresh meat to the worms? I hope that I am rotted and they don't want to eat me. F@#$ck the worms.
-- Marjane Satrapi
Maybe a love so great you cannot go on without it is better than no such love. I wish her nothing but peace, but this such a tragic loss for the world. 56 :(
Also, fuck sadness. It's a healthy human thing, sure, but so is giving it the middle finger. Take care, all of you, and maybe smile at a person who needs it today, just because fuck sadness.
The graphic novel was very good, showing what Iran must have felt like to iranians before the revolution, and the sadness at having lost that way of life. I highly recommend reading it.
And ? the author couldn't have written it from the pov of someone else. youre asking someone to do something that cant be done, and then blaming them for not doing it ?
I think it's a very well written personal memoir that shows what the revolution felt like to someone growing up in the Iranian urban upper class. It portrays the revolution as there being a hope for change, prior to religious men with beards and guns inexplicably showing up because that's what did happen from her perspective. I don't see anything necessarily wrong with this. The revolution was split between college-educated urban secular leftists and a much larger portion of religious conservatives, and the latter eclipsed the former so quickly that her viewpoint is probably legitimately what it looked like for her and her family. It doesn't try to do any political analysis of what motivated the Islamists or why they gained power because it's her personal story, it's not trying to be some sort of objective history of the Iranian revolution. I think it does what it set out to do very well, and it's an excellent story of the tragedy of just trading one oppressive dictatorship for another.
One of the most surprising things about the movie was how precisely it captured the artistic intent of the book. A serious achievement by those animators.
Besides her groundbeaking Persepolis, I was at the world premiere of The Voices, a wonderful black comedy, and got angry that the stupid distributor buried the film. We all loved it. Fuckers. She had a lot of problems to get her next films financed then.
"Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life"
The simple humanity in this candid description brought a small tear to my eyes. I'd say that the classical approach to this is a dry, clinical description of a depression stage, or a description of a how and not a why. Very welcomed in the age of AI slop!
>Did you ever notice you almost never read anything good about Iran?
You can read plenty of good about Iran if you read something other than geopolitical news. It's a very interesting country with an incredibly interesting history and language. The news is a pretty poor source for much of anything except for "events are happening" or "politicians have an agenda in [area]" -- I don't mean to belittle those. Both of those matter, but really no one should consider the news to provide thorough treatment for any large topic.
I have had the privilege and pleasure to work with some great engineers and scientists from Iran. Same with Turkey, and of course India, and so many other places in the world. People are individuals, no matter where they are from.
I do recognize that the type of person who I might encounter in the workplace is an educated, accomplished, English-speaking person who has likely gone through cultural adjustments to operate in an American workplace. So there’s a filter there.
But when you get to know people, especially when they talk about their family and childhood, the idea that a nation is full of bad people full of hate is just laughable.
I believe there is a qualitative difference between the governing systems in the west and a place where there are seven official allowed haircuts for men, aside from other things.
I believe there is a qualitative difference between the governing systems in a country that tries to regulate personal appearances, and one that would shift it's military to the other side of the planet, bombing and murdering Iranian school children and civilians en-masse for no particular reason.
I also believe that your claim of seven "official allowed" haircuts is bs, as with almost everything I ever read about Iran.
Source: I see that Tehrani men have the same variety of haircuts and facial hair styles as in any other city on the planet.
> Born Nov. 22, 1969, in Rasht, Iran, and grew up in Tehran. Sent to live in Austria at 14 during the Iran-Iraq war. Returned to Iran after her high school years and attended art school in Tehran.
> Left Iran for Europe again at 24 and continued her art studies in Strasbourg, France.
> Now lives in Paris as a French citizen. Since publishing "Persepolis," has not been back to Iran.
There were two large exile groups subsequent to the Iranian revolution: France and Albania. MEK has a large presence in both. I don't know enough of the history to say whether France was chosen because there was _already_ an affinity or not, but interestingly "merci" is one of the common ways to say "thank you" in Persian.
There was (might still be) a large Iranian population in Los Angeles. Enough to have a Farsi language UHF station and for the city to get a nickname of Tehrangeles.
The Vienna group was bigger. That's why she was sent to Vienna. Esp. the ex aristocrats and generals are all living in Vienna. Only the religious nutheads in Paris.
I guess kind of like Gabriel Garcia and Mexico, though I don't think Columbians would like anyone to describe him as having been Mexican (ex as Mexican-Columbian) in any way though he lived there for the majority of his life and had become very well integrated into the elite circles of Mexico city -that said, he never renounced his Columbian citizenship and I think he also considered himself Columbian and not Mexican --which makes sense, he was not born there and none of his parents were from there.
Nitpick: it's Colombia, not Columbia. And the last name is Garcia Marquez. Splitting half of the last name is not generally done. It sounds like calling somebody called McDonald just Mac.
France was historically very interested in the Near and Middle East, though colonially somewhat less successful than the UK; Napoleon sailed to Egypt in 1799, and later the French Republic protected Lebanese and Syrian Christians, up to some point in history. People from the Levant still like to study in France (incl. Nassim Nicholas Taleb). Hence, France is considered a strong and culturally developed country in the region.
And unlike the UK and US, they had no historic bad blood with Iran (Mossadegh et al.)
I always enjoyed the first half of Persepolis. Told from Satrapi's perspective, it was a very relatable story about a young child who was swept up by the world events around her, and tried to rebel in very normal, child-like ways. It was very relatable in that abstract sense, even if most of us have not been through a violent revolution. (and even more violent subsequent war with a neighboring state)
The second half of Persepolis was much more difficult for me, and I never know how to feel about it. I think above all else Satrapi deserves a lot of credit for describing herself realistically rather than trying to paint herself as a good person. (not that she was a bad person, but that she didn't shy away from parts of the story that show her in a poor light) I have a lot of respect for her honesty in the second half of the story, however her time in exile in Europe seemed to be one of self-indulgence, meandering, and minor self-destruction. All of which are understandable for someone who has been through such a traumatic turn of events, however it was a bit sad that the young, rebellious child that was so likable did not seem to survive the conflict.
> All of which are understandable for someone who has been through such a traumatic turn of events, however it was a bit sad that the young, rebellious child that was so likable did not seem to survive the conflict.
Great literature does not exist to be heartwarming but to speak fundamental truths, however uncomfortable they are. Persepolis cleaned up as you implicitly desire would cease to be the great work that it is.
I never said I wanted it to be changed. Even if you dislike or disagree with my take, I want to make that really clear; I don't think we should modify art because we find it unpleasant.
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It was exactly the depression and confusion in the second part that made me feel her humanity and thus deepened mine.
It is an incredible book and I feel grateful for it.
There's a parallel in Maus, where the PoV character runs increasingly into his Holocaust survivor's father's racism, even as he explores his father's threading the needle of 20th century Central Europe[1] . He calls his pa out on it, but for his pa the schwarzers aren't people, so there's no "there" there.
If Speigelman had a slightly deeper historical insight he might have drawn the connection between the byzantine precision of American race law and what Hitler had hoped to accomplish in his own "Wild West". Both end products of the secular wave of colonialism, with Hitler's being at least a hundred years too late, held back by the late stage of German nationhood.
Suffering is no guarantor of virtue. Extremes of violence can brutalize not just individuals but entire peoples. Which is why we should not look to victims as prima facie exemplars, but with empathy and deeper understanding.
[1] the "Bloodlands" of Tim Snyder
Do all stories need to be of virtue and success?
It seems like you're disappointed it wasn't a modern "noble savage" myth, that it was realistic instead of a fairy tale about a person coming from a bad place to a good place and being happy, wholesome, and free.
This kind of mythology is a pretty big problem in the western world right now as is the kneejerk reaction to it.
That’s a rather uncharitable take on what the poster you’re responding to wrote.
I read Persepolis a few years ago, and it’s hard not to come away with a similar impression. The first part often does resemble a fairy tale of sorts, while the second part is a pretty dark story of teenage alienation. The contrast is jarring, and it goes well beyond “duh nobody’s perfect”.
Both parts are excellent in their own right, and quite unlike any other book I’ve read, but there is indeed something strange going on in part 2. Most readers will remember this, I think.
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I’ve always wondered how much of the second part is truth and how much is fiction. That a teenage girl from Iran, living by herself in Central Europe with essentially no local connections, would become a drug dealer to her classmates, and on top of that somehow be let off the hook for it by the headmaster, stretches credibility a little bit.
Idk, I didn’t read this book. But I lived a similar version of that reality in a conservative southern US town. My home life was challenging. I sold drugs and generally was a rebellious troublesome teenager. All the officials in my school and local law enforcement gave me kind slaps on the wrist compared to what they could/should have. I had to assume they were trying to get me to a point of adulthood without having life ruining consequences weighing me down. I straightened up by around 17-18 but there were certainly a few times between 14-17 I could have been charged for adult felony crimes and was let off the hook, never even spent a night in a juvenile detention facility but I was made to flush a lot of drugs down some toilets a time or two. I think it used to be more common to let kids figure things out for themselves. I don’t think the similar levels of leniency would occur, it’s all zero tolerance.
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A foreign student who is afraid of returning to her home country sounds like an ideal low-level drug dealer. They are legally vulnerable because they are afraid of being expelled from the country, and they have access to lots of potential buyers in their fellow students. And someone who is new and is looking for friends is more easily approached and recruited.
I've personally encountered some stories that were pretty much exactly that.
Vulnerable young people becoming low level drug dealers (often for lack of other options) isn't exactly a rare story.
I'm from Vienna (admittedly younger) but it seems believable. The place she picks up the drugs in the comic is "Café Camera" which is clearly a reference to "Camera Club" which was well-known for this in the 80s and 90s.
For some reason immigrant drug dealers in Europe doesn't really strain credulity very much.
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Poor woman. Somehow despite growing through hardships, it’s the loss of her husband that broke her.
May she be at peace now, and her work cherished.
Has there been any study that analyses the frequency of natural death of one shortly after death of his/her partner. How different is that compared to what one would expect assuming statistical independence and based image and health adjusted mortality curves.
Yes: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Widowhood_effect
Thanks.
Does it say what happened?
Died of sadness did make me wonder about something self inflicted.
That's always a possibility but I've seen my Grandpa die of a broken heart after my Grandma died. The night of her funeral he asked his children if they thought someone could die of a broken heart and after that it took him less than a year to go himself. I'd never considered that saying to be true until then but I watched it happen.
Yes, I also took it to be a tactful-as-possible way to say that.
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In a previous life I used to model insurance payouts for residential mortgages. The average we used was within 7 years.
you don't even have to be partners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Cocteau#Death
> We are focusing on the small details and hiding the misery in the world. Look at the smoker and we miss global warming, war, and the crap we eat--not the bad guys but smoking. I smoke and they talk about cancer, I eat and they talk about cholesterol, I make love, it's AIDS. Before AIDS and cholesterol and cancer there's the pleasure of making love and eating and smoking. I have to die someday, so if the thing that gave me pleasure all of my life kills me instead of me going under a truck, that's fine. Besides, why should I live so that when I die I give fresh meat to the worms? I hope that I am rotted and they don't want to eat me. F@#$ck the worms.
-- Marjane Satrapi
Maybe a love so great you cannot go on without it is better than no such love. I wish her nothing but peace, but this such a tragic loss for the world. 56 :(
Also, fuck sadness. It's a healthy human thing, sure, but so is giving it the middle finger. Take care, all of you, and maybe smile at a person who needs it today, just because fuck sadness.
Thank you for this comment. Especially on a forum as focused on optimization of health, peptide therapy etc. You made my day a bit better.
Died of "sadness" ... that's incredibly sad. I mean, I know it's possible, but it seems so surreal to hear.
It's incomplete without the rest of the sentence: "a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life"
Grief is not just metaphorical, severe bereavement can affect health in very real ways.
yes, stress hormones may be one cause and can harm a lot of tissues
The graphic novel was very good, showing what Iran must have felt like to iranians before the revolution, and the sadness at having lost that way of life. I highly recommend reading it.
At least to the kind of Iranians who were sending their children to French schools, yes.
But of course the other kind of people very rarely have someone writing international bestsellers on their behalf, so this is all we’ll get.
And ? the author couldn't have written it from the pov of someone else. youre asking someone to do something that cant be done, and then blaming them for not doing it ?
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I think it's a very well written personal memoir that shows what the revolution felt like to someone growing up in the Iranian urban upper class. It portrays the revolution as there being a hope for change, prior to religious men with beards and guns inexplicably showing up because that's what did happen from her perspective. I don't see anything necessarily wrong with this. The revolution was split between college-educated urban secular leftists and a much larger portion of religious conservatives, and the latter eclipsed the former so quickly that her viewpoint is probably legitimately what it looked like for her and her family. It doesn't try to do any political analysis of what motivated the Islamists or why they gained power because it's her personal story, it's not trying to be some sort of objective history of the Iranian revolution. I think it does what it set out to do very well, and it's an excellent story of the tragedy of just trading one oppressive dictatorship for another.
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The movie was really beautifully done and I've wanted to read the book itself. Rest in peace.
I didn't realize there was a movie. Thanks for posting so I can check it out.
I will second, the graphic novel is excellent. Up there with Maus in terms of showing you a new perspective.
I think the movie came first, at least in the US.
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The book is beautiful too, I recommend it.
One of the most surprising things about the movie was how precisely it captured the artistic intent of the book. A serious achievement by those animators.
Besides her groundbeaking Persepolis, I was at the world premiere of The Voices, a wonderful black comedy, and got angry that the stupid distributor buried the film. We all loved it. Fuckers. She had a lot of problems to get her next films financed then.
"Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life"
The simple humanity in this candid description brought a small tear to my eyes. I'd say that the classical approach to this is a dry, clinical description of a depression stage, or a description of a how and not a why. Very welcomed in the age of AI slop!
Persepolis was really good, read it a few years ago. really recommended
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>Did you ever notice you almost never read anything good about Iran?
You can read plenty of good about Iran if you read something other than geopolitical news. It's a very interesting country with an incredibly interesting history and language. The news is a pretty poor source for much of anything except for "events are happening" or "politicians have an agenda in [area]" -- I don't mean to belittle those. Both of those matter, but really no one should consider the news to provide thorough treatment for any large topic.
I have spent half of the last decade or so on the ground in Iran. You're right the "news" is a very poor source for much of anything about Iran.
I think this is talking about the hyper-oppressive, aggressive government of modern-day Iran, and not how it was pre-Islamic rule.
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I'm part of a small forum that has a very world-wide audience.
It's always a joy to talk shop with a guy in England, a guy in Iran, and a guy in Poland in the same thread.
"The asymmetry is the tell"...is the (AI) tell.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mirrors_of_the_Unseen
> Mirrors of the Unseen: Journeys in Iran (2006) is a travel book written by British travel writer Jason Elliot.
And a fascinating history of mathematics as well.
I have had the privilege and pleasure to work with some great engineers and scientists from Iran. Same with Turkey, and of course India, and so many other places in the world. People are individuals, no matter where they are from.
I do recognize that the type of person who I might encounter in the workplace is an educated, accomplished, English-speaking person who has likely gone through cultural adjustments to operate in an American workplace. So there’s a filter there.
But when you get to know people, especially when they talk about their family and childhood, the idea that a nation is full of bad people full of hate is just laughable.
There have been fairly recent descriptions of the kinds of Iranian architecture that provide passive cooling in hot weather.
I believe there is a qualitative difference between the governing systems in the west and a place where there are seven official allowed haircuts for men, aside from other things.
I believe there is a qualitative difference between the governing systems in a country that tries to regulate personal appearances, and one that would shift it's military to the other side of the planet, bombing and murdering Iranian school children and civilians en-masse for no particular reason.
I also believe that your claim of seven "official allowed" haircuts is bs, as with almost everything I ever read about Iran.
Source: I see that Tehrani men have the same variety of haircuts and facial hair styles as in any other city on the planet.
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What's the connection with France?
Even Khomeini was in exile in France until the shah was deposed.
> Born Nov. 22, 1969, in Rasht, Iran, and grew up in Tehran. Sent to live in Austria at 14 during the Iran-Iraq war. Returned to Iran after her high school years and attended art school in Tehran.
> Left Iran for Europe again at 24 and continued her art studies in Strasbourg, France.
> Now lives in Paris as a French citizen. Since publishing "Persepolis," has not been back to Iran.
https://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/0...
There were two large exile groups subsequent to the Iranian revolution: France and Albania. MEK has a large presence in both. I don't know enough of the history to say whether France was chosen because there was _already_ an affinity or not, but interestingly "merci" is one of the common ways to say "thank you" in Persian.
There was (might still be) a large Iranian population in Los Angeles. Enough to have a Farsi language UHF station and for the city to get a nickname of Tehrangeles.
The Vienna group was bigger. That's why she was sent to Vienna. Esp. the ex aristocrats and generals are all living in Vienna. Only the religious nutheads in Paris.
That she's French-Iranian?
It says so right in the title so I may have misunderstood your question.
I guess kind of like Gabriel Garcia and Mexico, though I don't think Columbians would like anyone to describe him as having been Mexican (ex as Mexican-Columbian) in any way though he lived there for the majority of his life and had become very well integrated into the elite circles of Mexico city -that said, he never renounced his Columbian citizenship and I think he also considered himself Columbian and not Mexican --which makes sense, he was not born there and none of his parents were from there.
Nitpick: it's Colombia, not Columbia. And the last name is Garcia Marquez. Splitting half of the last name is not generally done. It sounds like calling somebody called McDonald just Mac.
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France was historically very interested in the Near and Middle East, though colonially somewhat less successful than the UK; Napoleon sailed to Egypt in 1799, and later the French Republic protected Lebanese and Syrian Christians, up to some point in history. People from the Levant still like to study in France (incl. Nassim Nicholas Taleb). Hence, France is considered a strong and culturally developed country in the region.
And unlike the UK and US, they had no historic bad blood with Iran (Mossadegh et al.)
And French is still language of educated class in some places in Levant, esp. Liban.
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A more recent influence came from the Sykes-Picot Agreement [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement
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