Vincent paronnaud persepolis book

Persepolis book 1

A Sony Pictures Classics Release. The burden we place on non-Western art is that of metaphor. We almost always read it as symbolic of its nation's politics or as an allegory of the inequities of globalization. The personal obsessions, subjective observations, and stylistic flourishes of the artist are all subordinate to this interpretation.

In her pair of Persepolis graphic novels, Marjane Satrapi found an elegant solution to this problem. The two volumes chronicle a childhood disrupted by cataclysmic events. The first book takes place in Iran of as a ten-year-old Satrapi confronts a world changed by the Islamic revolution. Rich with political and personal details, the book introduces us to Satrapi's courageous relatives who opposed the Shah, her schoolmates who cannot get used to wearing veils, policemen who use the new regulations to bully the public, and to a nation torn by its bloody war with Iraq.

The young Marjane wrestles with God and Marx internally, speaking to each as a disembodied head each night, as externally she watches the world and values of her progressive parents crumble. As the story continues, Marjane grows up, emigrates, and is educated abroad at the insistence of her parents, gets married, and finally moves permanently to France.

She writes about and illustrates these later adventures with the same penetrating self-analysis as she brings to her earlier life. The books provide an unforgettable portrait of a young woman, a lively recent history of Iran, and an account of modern-day exile. So, it was with high hopes that I went to see the animated film version of Persepolis and, perhaps, it is precisely these expectations that caused my great disappointment.

The plot of the novels is squeezed into the hour-and-a half running time of the film, removing many of the vivid characters and ideas. This need not be problem, of course, as nearly all books adapted to film go through a similar process of condensation.