Like Spiegelman's Maus, Satrapi's book combines political history and memoir, portraying a country's 20th-century upheavals through the story of one family. Her protagonist is Marji, a tough, sassy little Iranian girl, bent on prying from her evasive elders if not truth, at least a credible explanation of the travails they are living through ... It is the war with Iraq that is this book's climax and turning point. Satrapi is adept at conveying the numbing cynicism induced by living in a city under siege both from Iraqi bombs and from a homegrown regime that uses the war as pretext to exterminate 'the enemy within' ... Satrapi's drawing style is bold and vivid. She paints a thick inky black-on-white, in a faux-naïf pastiche of East and West.
Back in Iran, Satrapi, herself a descendant from pre-shah royalty and the daughter of Marxists, found her family locked in a deadly dance with the forces of revolution ... Satrapi converts a childhood filled with secret police and a long war with Iraq into a comic strip that is both funny and dark ... These are remarkable tales of family resilience told with wry humor shorn of sentimentality.
...Satrapi in her moving, graphic-novel-style memoir, Persepolis, which recounts her life as the daughter of educated, upper-middle-class parents before and after the Iranian revolution of 1979 ... fraught with peril, humor and irony ... The book is also a primer on how the Westernized elements of Iranian society dealt with new restrictions for women, the politicization of the school system, and other aspects of the Islamic regime ... And with its stark, highly stylized black-and-white drawings, it is also a frightening look at what life was like in the early 1980s, when the war with Iraq brought about a period of extreme repression at home.
A memoir of growing up as a girl in revolutionary Iran, Persepolis provides a unique glimpse into a nearly unknown and unreachable way of life. It has the strange quality of a note in a bottle written by a shipwrecked islander ... Unlike the complex nuances of the story, the artistic details are minimal and shading is non-existent...Satrapi makes wonderful use of solid, high-contrast black shapes ... Written with astonishing detail and from the point of view of a child, Persepolis domesticates world events and makes them relatable and real. It pulls back the veil on a culture that utterly preoccupies us, but about which we know little.
But the simple lines and shapes of Satrapi's drawings lend poignancy to the story. The fact that she is able to portray such a vast range of emotions with a few simple strokes of a pen is impressive ... Persepolis covers Satrapi's story from when she was 6, living in Tehran with her intellectual parents, to when she was 14 and had to flee to Vienna to continue her education. At its strongest, it's an inspiring coming-of-age story ... Illuminating the similarities between the Western and Islamic worlds is what Satrapi does best.
Satrapi's autobiography is a timely and timeless story of a young girl's life under the Islamic Revolution ... Despite the grimness, Satrapi never lapses into sensationalism or sentimentality. Skillfully presenting a child's view of war and her own shifting ideals, she also shows quotidian life in Tehran and her family's pride and love for their country despite the tumultuous times ... powerfully understated.
