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.
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.
The lenience you enjoyed presumably resulted in problems or harm for others.
I got a few breaks as well as a kid too. I think teenage boys end up being a community investment and people are cleaning up broken windows, stolen cars, graffiti, and worse as we hope the kids grow up.
Very true. I’d just say, it’s the leniency that’s the investment more so than the cleaning up part. Because the damage being done is almost a given. How elders respond to it shapes whether it becomes an asset or a liability.
> gave me kind slaps on the wrist compared to what they could/should have
I think that slaps on the writs that lead to adjusted member of society are waaay better then felony crimes charges that lead to life of in-out of prison with much harder way to integrate.
People who are treated like you was have overall much better results then people who have book thrown on them as youg.
I genuinely dislike troublesome teenagers, but I also think that your story is a success story of the "dont destroy them" approach.
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.
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.
What's jarring to many people is it isn't the three act hero's journey of a noble savage. The "something" going on is that it isn't a copy of just about the only narrative in western mythos:
1. Departure - from a humble background the subject leaves amid struggle
2. Growth and Initiation - the subject discovers who they are building themselves into the hero they'll become
3. Heroic Return - the now hero makes a return to their beginnings to great success
Instead, Persepolis is a much more realistic story and each act is around three very different kinds of strife experienced by our hero and only in the very end a kind of coda where things go well.
My criticism of the criticism is that Persepolis is tremendously more realistic than the hero's journey and people are jarred by it because it doesn't represent their imagination of what real world struggle is like, the fact that it upsets people is one of those deep core societal issues because of the wrongness of the lens people see the world through.
I think you make a fine analysis, but I would just offer that real life can be quite jarring and uncomfortable. So a story which paints a very real picture of life (rather than constructing a narrative) might just be unpleasant. I don't think her story is poorly written, and I think it is quite memorable.
For reference, I also really enjoyed the Catcher in the Rye, and there are some superficial similarities: a young person is scarred by events in their lives and succumbs to depression. (there are a myriad of differences between the two stories -- I'm not drawing an equivalence, just making one comparison)
Catcher in the Rye is probably best read as an angry teenager: you meet Holden Caufield and he's witty, cynical, funny, defiant, etc. You might fall in love with the character, but what you ultimately learn is that he's a miserable failure; he lost the battle with his depression and so many of the people he was cutting down were just normal, decent people trying to enjoy their lives.
Crucially, we never meet Holden when he is young, bright eyed, and innocent. The narrative structure shows us who he is right away, and we the reader learn that this is actually quite a bad thing throughout the course of the story.
Persepolis works a bit differently: we spend the first half of the book with innocent, bright-eyed Marjane and we fall in love with that character. The character we fall in love with is taken from us by the events of the story, by living unsupervised in exile, etc. It's nothing but sad. It's well-written, it's very memorable, but I don't think there's anything wrong with feeling unhappy about an unhappy turn of events.
> So a story which paints a very real picture of life (rather than constructing a narrative) might just be unpleasant.
May be, but to someone going through similar life experiences an honest story might give their internal emotions some validation. Art can do wonders in that "I am not the only one" aspect.
Persepolis absolutely DOES use the “hero’s journey” narrative archetype you’re claiming it avoids. The second part even ends by explicitly stating that she has grown into a different person, and is now ready to “face the world” when she leaves her family for the second time.
Indeed, the story is quite Western overall, which is perhaps unsurprising, given that the author had already been living in the West for over a decade when she wrote it.
You mean Iran had been pushing itself west/modern and was quite western by 1979. So she was raised as a young girl into a western context, despite that people now want to deny this existed.
Even back then the mullahs and islam were looked upon as an external occupation force to some extent. Now 10x worse of course, but even back then. A lot of people seem to want to see some sort of alternative/sufficiently different state/society succeed, even if that means totally falsifying history.
I kind of resent that "western" started to be used as synonym for "America". Specifically this particular schema along with insistence with happy ending is specific feature of American book writing and cinema. Non American literature is much more likely to go out of that schematic.
To whoever is downvoting this: it is not even a criticism. Just a description. When you discuss stories, Americans will frequently insist on the "hero story is the only one possible fun story" and simultaneously interpret bad ending as punishment for moral failure. French wont argue that all that often. And European literature is in general more likely not be that.
And second, using "western" as synonym for "american" wherever the author knows a lot about American and just assumes everything in Europe is exactly the same is something I noticed multiple times on HN.
I'm talking about something much broader than the saccharine happy ending motif of Disney movies.
I'm paraphrasing The Hero with a Thousand Faces which is a study of world mythology, not 20th century American storytelling. This hero story is found around the world but PARTICULARLY in descendants of the proto-indo-european culture, particularly ancient Greece and the western Roman empire.
It's not "happy endings" I'm talking about but the hero being taken out of their world, finding themselves and growing, and returning... a hero, the story of individual progress and success.
And I am saying that when I read western literature from Europe, a LOT of it was not hero journey thing.
I am saying that hero journey as you desribe it is absolutely NOT the only western narrative, if you include non american literature. And I am saying that when someone insist on that being the only narrative, they are typically american.
And someone else (who probably reads more american then me) told me even american literature actually contains other narratives too.
There is almost nothing more Western than this kind of self-criticism: blaming oneself for not having imagined a wider range of possibilities. By the time this reflex reaches your shore, any criticism you might address to it has already been pre-assimilated into its canon. Worse: you may not even be heard, because the whole discourse is already busy talking about the voices it has supposedly suppressed.
That is the trick. It is often less interested in articulating what was actually suppressed than in endlessly reaffirming that something was suppressed. Self-criticism becomes a passion of the self: the subject punishes itself for not being the idealized Other, and in doing so expands its own range of motion.
Criticism becomes assimilation: it uproots you from the very world it claims to redeem. And the only way out of the double bind is to set off for distant shores, carrying the trial with you.
> 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.
The problem is the version of events you'd prefer to see simply never happens, it's just pure fantasy. If this represented that it would be reduced to childish nonsense.
I think what OC is saying above is that the adult version of reality is often unsatisfying - and that often the ability of great artists is to show us this, knowing they will be judged, and get past it, because a true record of history is more important than an indulgent, sanitised one that makes for easy reading.
> I think what OC is saying above is that the adult version of reality is often unsatisfying
I'd quibble with your choice of words there, although I agree with the overall point - ultimately adult reality is the only thing that satisfies, warts and all, everything else is a waste of energy.
This is even true by proxy in more fantastic works, where the point is to communicate aspects of adult reality in less direct ways.
There is a very clear cultural divide here on this between the americans and everyone else, which is kind of funny given Girard was working in the US when he famously formulated it so clearly to a mainly american audience.
> "…Someone recently asked me on what grounds the Admissions Jury proceeds when it lays its beneficent hand upon a certain number of people in the School. It’s simply this: they won’t make a bad impression; they won’t make a bad impression right away. They’ll do that later, once they’ve got a bit of experience under their belt, once they’ve acquired a little authority."
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.
That "bad" part is where her story becomes more valuable.
Literature has many idealistic heroes, which are also patronising, in a sense.
Satrapi makes us self reflect, which is much better, and much more real.
In contrast, I'm really tired of the catholic fiction, it's always the same. Like written by an AI, but from the year 1100.
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.
"It usually appears after a significant stressor, either physical or emotional; when caused by the latter, the condition is sometimes called broken heart syndrome"
Don't know the details, didn't read the comic, and don't really have a personal interest on the history so what follows is just general speculation. She looked depressed enough to commit suicide. Is a fact also that people that orbit around drugs, tend to die younger, by suicide or by the effects of the drugs.
In any case if two relatively young people die in a short interval of time would be wise to look for environmental effects. Oil pigments have chemicals, and some colors were removed for being notoriously unsafe. Going further, slow poisoning to eliminate opponents with the benefits of plausible deniability is trendy among some criminals unfortunately. If somebody "dies of grief", research for discarding a hidden toxic should be started, just to be safe.
I am currently in that situation, and I can tell you it's a battle to keep the darkness away when you suddenly find yourself alone. I'm managing, with help, but not everyone can.
Indeed. It is probably the most significant thing that ever happens to a person. My sincere condolences.
I have not dealt with such a change but have dealt with grief. Try to catch the sun rise. It is incredibly beautiful.
It will probably hurt because the instinct is to want to share the beauty to enjoy it. The good thing is that you can, with the version of your significant one you hold in your mind. I am serious, do catch the sun.
Grief hits in overpowering waves. Over time there is space between the waves. They will always be there but they become survivable.
My wife suddenly died 4 years ago, we had 3 little kids at the time. You need to focus on a) being kind to yourself, whatever that means to you and b) the good things about the change. All change has good parts and bad parts, and it's easy to focus on negative things. Especially with a death since in magnitude they are probably greater than the good things. But if you focus on what you lost you will simply lose the rest of yourself.
I also think that women have a harder time with this than men, possibly because maternal death in childbirth used to be so much more common. But this is just a guess. Certainly until it happens to you its not the sorts of things that you think about too much, and once it does happen you tend to speak to people who are going through the more acute phase of it since they are still actively processing it.
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.
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.
Adding to what you said, it's worth to mention that her novel contains grave historical inaccuracies such that suggesting that the Cinema Rex fire was done by the Shah blocking the exits with police letting everyone burn, and later blamed on Islamists (what the revolutionary zeitgeist at the time wanted to believe), while in fact it was exactly the other way around
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 ?
There’s no “blaming” here at all, just the observation that books that are considered to be representative of a certain culture are often only representative of that culture’s elite.
Sorry, I was imprecise. What it must have felt like to some iranians. I'd love to hear if you have tips for books that show other experiences from that period!
> 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.
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.
Thanks for the correction. I saw the books in the book stores several months after the movie release. I suppose they were doing a rerun to toe in with the movie's popularity.
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.
I rewatched it recently and it’s still such a good movie.
I’ll always remember the outrage I felt when they go to the hospital when her father needs heart surgery and they have to pretend not to know the hospital director because he was previously their janitor and they were afraid to embarrass him by acknowledging that and not getting treatment. Absurdity.
"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!
I read Persepolis in French, and I don't speak French as a native language, so I worry that I missed some of the art and the nuance of it. But, even so, I thought it was beautiful. She was an extremely talented storyteller, and I'm sad that she left us so soon.
I read all the persepolis comics a long time ago and to my memory it was the first time I cried reading a comic. A beautiful work of art. I would recommend to anyone reading this comment to order the first book.
> 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.
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.)
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.
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.
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.
Good question. I think maybe it was because a good deal of academics from the Islamic world were educated in France already due to the colonies they did have. Algerians, Tunisians, Syrians, Moroccans, Lebanese... Not an expert so could totally be wrong here, but maybe France put in more effort to incorporate local elites into their own bureaucratic elite system? I imagine there were probably more Muslims in the grande ecoles in France in the 50-60s than in the English elite schools (or US ones for that matter).
Also, I know France practiced (and probably still practices) a good deal of academic "cultural outreach", promoting their culture and especially their language abroad.
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.
Just expanding on this. In hispanic countries we have two last names. One you get from your father side and the other one you get from the mother side. When the first last name is very common like Lopez, Garcia, Perez, etc. it is common practice to keep the second last name when you are talking about them. Otherwise it sounds too plain. Like Gabriel Garcia could be anyone, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a renown author.
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.
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.
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.
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.
The lenience you enjoyed presumably resulted in problems or harm for others.
I got a few breaks as well as a kid too. I think teenage boys end up being a community investment and people are cleaning up broken windows, stolen cars, graffiti, and worse as we hope the kids grow up.
Very true. I’d just say, it’s the leniency that’s the investment more so than the cleaning up part. Because the damage being done is almost a given. How elders respond to it shapes whether it becomes an asset or a liability.
And it probably saved a lot of problems or harm for others, further down the line. OP might have become a career criminal without that lenience.
> gave me kind slaps on the wrist compared to what they could/should have
I think that slaps on the writs that lead to adjusted member of society are waaay better then felony crimes charges that lead to life of in-out of prison with much harder way to integrate.
People who are treated like you was have overall much better results then people who have book thrown on them as youg.
I genuinely dislike troublesome teenagers, but I also think that your story is a success story of the "dont destroy them" approach.
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.
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.
What's jarring to many people is it isn't the three act hero's journey of a noble savage. The "something" going on is that it isn't a copy of just about the only narrative in western mythos:
1. Departure - from a humble background the subject leaves amid struggle
2. Growth and Initiation - the subject discovers who they are building themselves into the hero they'll become
3. Heroic Return - the now hero makes a return to their beginnings to great success
Instead, Persepolis is a much more realistic story and each act is around three very different kinds of strife experienced by our hero and only in the very end a kind of coda where things go well.
My criticism of the criticism is that Persepolis is tremendously more realistic than the hero's journey and people are jarred by it because it doesn't represent their imagination of what real world struggle is like, the fact that it upsets people is one of those deep core societal issues because of the wrongness of the lens people see the world through.
I think you make a fine analysis, but I would just offer that real life can be quite jarring and uncomfortable. So a story which paints a very real picture of life (rather than constructing a narrative) might just be unpleasant. I don't think her story is poorly written, and I think it is quite memorable.
For reference, I also really enjoyed the Catcher in the Rye, and there are some superficial similarities: a young person is scarred by events in their lives and succumbs to depression. (there are a myriad of differences between the two stories -- I'm not drawing an equivalence, just making one comparison)
Catcher in the Rye is probably best read as an angry teenager: you meet Holden Caufield and he's witty, cynical, funny, defiant, etc. You might fall in love with the character, but what you ultimately learn is that he's a miserable failure; he lost the battle with his depression and so many of the people he was cutting down were just normal, decent people trying to enjoy their lives.
Crucially, we never meet Holden when he is young, bright eyed, and innocent. The narrative structure shows us who he is right away, and we the reader learn that this is actually quite a bad thing throughout the course of the story.
Persepolis works a bit differently: we spend the first half of the book with innocent, bright-eyed Marjane and we fall in love with that character. The character we fall in love with is taken from us by the events of the story, by living unsupervised in exile, etc. It's nothing but sad. It's well-written, it's very memorable, but I don't think there's anything wrong with feeling unhappy about an unhappy turn of events.
> So a story which paints a very real picture of life (rather than constructing a narrative) might just be unpleasant.
May be, but to someone going through similar life experiences an honest story might give their internal emotions some validation. Art can do wonders in that "I am not the only one" aspect.
Ethan Hawke talks about that aspect of art here https://youtu.be/WRS9Gek4V5Q?si=P2Hz1ZnXWlP93f2U
One of my favorite videos.
Persepolis absolutely DOES use the “hero’s journey” narrative archetype you’re claiming it avoids. The second part even ends by explicitly stating that she has grown into a different person, and is now ready to “face the world” when she leaves her family for the second time.
Indeed, the story is quite Western overall, which is perhaps unsurprising, given that the author had already been living in the West for over a decade when she wrote it.
You mean Iran had been pushing itself west/modern and was quite western by 1979. So she was raised as a young girl into a western context, despite that people now want to deny this existed.
Even back then the mullahs and islam were looked upon as an external occupation force to some extent. Now 10x worse of course, but even back then. A lot of people seem to want to see some sort of alternative/sufficiently different state/society succeed, even if that means totally falsifying history.
I kind of resent that "western" started to be used as synonym for "America". Specifically this particular schema along with insistence with happy ending is specific feature of American book writing and cinema. Non American literature is much more likely to go out of that schematic.
To whoever is downvoting this: it is not even a criticism. Just a description. When you discuss stories, Americans will frequently insist on the "hero story is the only one possible fun story" and simultaneously interpret bad ending as punishment for moral failure. French wont argue that all that often. And European literature is in general more likely not be that.
And second, using "western" as synonym for "american" wherever the author knows a lot about American and just assumes everything in Europe is exactly the same is something I noticed multiple times on HN.
I'm talking about something much broader than the saccharine happy ending motif of Disney movies.
I'm paraphrasing The Hero with a Thousand Faces which is a study of world mythology, not 20th century American storytelling. This hero story is found around the world but PARTICULARLY in descendants of the proto-indo-european culture, particularly ancient Greece and the western Roman empire.
It's not "happy endings" I'm talking about but the hero being taken out of their world, finding themselves and growing, and returning... a hero, the story of individual progress and success.
And I am saying that when I read western literature from Europe, a LOT of it was not hero journey thing.
I am saying that hero journey as you desribe it is absolutely NOT the only western narrative, if you include non american literature. And I am saying that when someone insist on that being the only narrative, they are typically american.
And someone else (who probably reads more american then me) told me even american literature actually contains other narratives too.
American novels frequently don't follow these tropes. It's more of a Hollywood thing, part of telling a satisfying story in 100-160 minutes.
> western mythos
There is almost nothing more Western than this kind of self-criticism: blaming oneself for not having imagined a wider range of possibilities. By the time this reflex reaches your shore, any criticism you might address to it has already been pre-assimilated into its canon. Worse: you may not even be heard, because the whole discourse is already busy talking about the voices it has supposedly suppressed.
That is the trick. It is often less interested in articulating what was actually suppressed than in endlessly reaffirming that something was suppressed. Self-criticism becomes a passion of the self: the subject punishes itself for not being the idealized Other, and in doing so expands its own range of motion.
Criticism becomes assimilation: it uproots you from the very world it claims to redeem. And the only way out of the double bind is to set off for distant shores, carrying the trial with you.
> 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.
The problem is the version of events you'd prefer to see simply never happens, it's just pure fantasy. If this represented that it would be reduced to childish nonsense.
I don't think it's childish nonsense to wish better things for people, or to express disappointment when people err.
I think what OC is saying above is that the adult version of reality is often unsatisfying - and that often the ability of great artists is to show us this, knowing they will be judged, and get past it, because a true record of history is more important than an indulgent, sanitised one that makes for easy reading.
> I think what OC is saying above is that the adult version of reality is often unsatisfying
I'd quibble with your choice of words there, although I agree with the overall point - ultimately adult reality is the only thing that satisfies, warts and all, everything else is a waste of energy.
This is even true by proxy in more fantastic works, where the point is to communicate aspects of adult reality in less direct ways.
There is a very clear cultural divide here on this between the americans and everyone else, which is kind of funny given Girard was working in the US when he famously formulated it so clearly to a mainly american audience.
> "…Someone recently asked me on what grounds the Admissions Jury proceeds when it lays its beneficent hand upon a certain number of people in the School. It’s simply this: they won’t make a bad impression; they won’t make a bad impression right away. They’ll do that later, once they’ve got a bit of experience under their belt, once they’ve acquired a little authority."
— J. Lacan, lesson of April 15, 1975, in RSI.
https://anonpaste.pw/v/ab148fcf-6827-4b8c-a6d1-a9239d643ae7#...
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
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.
That "bad" part is where her story becomes more valuable. Literature has many idealistic heroes, which are also patronising, in a sense. Satrapi makes us self reflect, which is much better, and much more real. In contrast, I'm really tired of the catholic fiction, it's always the same. Like written by an AI, but from the year 1100.
Article called the book «Persopolis» :(
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.
Yes, I also took it to be a tactful-as-possible way to say that.
Same here but was curious about stats of broken heart syndrome anyhow.
I'm curious about it too.
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.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Takotsubo_cardiomyopathy
"It usually appears after a significant stressor, either physical or emotional; when caused by the latter, the condition is sometimes called broken heart syndrome"
Probably happens to other social animals too.
Don't know the details, didn't read the comic, and don't really have a personal interest on the history so what follows is just general speculation. She looked depressed enough to commit suicide. Is a fact also that people that orbit around drugs, tend to die younger, by suicide or by the effects of the drugs.
In any case if two relatively young people die in a short interval of time would be wise to look for environmental effects. Oil pigments have chemicals, and some colors were removed for being notoriously unsafe. Going further, slow poisoning to eliminate opponents with the benefits of plausible deniability is trendy among some criminals unfortunately. If somebody "dies of grief", research for discarding a hidden toxic should be started, just to be safe.
you don't even have to be partners https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jean_Cocteau#Death
In a previous life I used to model insurance payouts for residential mortgages. The average we used was within 7 years.
I am currently in that situation, and I can tell you it's a battle to keep the darkness away when you suddenly find yourself alone. I'm managing, with help, but not everyone can.
Indeed. It is probably the most significant thing that ever happens to a person. My sincere condolences.
I have not dealt with such a change but have dealt with grief. Try to catch the sun rise. It is incredibly beautiful.
It will probably hurt because the instinct is to want to share the beauty to enjoy it. The good thing is that you can, with the version of your significant one you hold in your mind. I am serious, do catch the sun.
Grief hits in overpowering waves. Over time there is space between the waves. They will always be there but they become survivable.
All the best.
My wife suddenly died 4 years ago, we had 3 little kids at the time. You need to focus on a) being kind to yourself, whatever that means to you and b) the good things about the change. All change has good parts and bad parts, and it's easy to focus on negative things. Especially with a death since in magnitude they are probably greater than the good things. But if you focus on what you lost you will simply lose the rest of yourself.
I also think that women have a harder time with this than men, possibly because maternal death in childbirth used to be so much more common. But this is just a guess. Certainly until it happens to you its not the sorts of things that you think about too much, and once it does happen you tend to speak to people who are going through the more acute phase of it since they are still actively processing it.
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.
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.
Adding to what you said, it's worth to mention that her novel contains grave historical inaccuracies such that suggesting that the Cinema Rex fire was done by the Shah blocking the exits with police letting everyone burn, and later blamed on Islamists (what the revolutionary zeitgeist at the time wanted to believe), while in fact it was exactly the other way around
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cinema_Rex_fire
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 ?
There’s no “blaming” here at all, just the observation that books that are considered to be representative of a certain culture are often only representative of that culture’s elite.
Ok. I thought that was well known.
Sorry, I was imprecise. What it must have felt like to some iranians. I'd love to hear if you have tips for books that show other experiences from that period!
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.
> 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.
My attitude is Fuck Optimisation, it's just so exhausting and boring.
The movie was really beautifully done and I've wanted to read the book itself. Rest in peace.
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.
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.
The graphic novel in the US was 2003-2004, the film was 2007, unless I'm mistaken.
Thanks for the correction. I saw the books in the book stores several months after the movie release. I suppose they were doing a rerun to toe in with the movie's popularity.
I would recommend the book over it
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
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.
Persepolis was really good, read it a few years ago. really recommended
I will always be grateful to her for so touchingly letting me in to her life, in a special part of the world, at a unique time of it’s existence
I rewatched it recently and it’s still such a good movie.
I’ll always remember the outrage I felt when they go to the hospital when her father needs heart surgery and they have to pretend not to know the hospital director because he was previously their janitor and they were afraid to embarrass him by acknowledging that and not getting treatment. Absurdity.
Would recommend reading the comic instead
"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!
I read Persepolis in French, and I don't speak French as a native language, so I worry that I missed some of the art and the nuance of it. But, even so, I thought it was beautiful. She was an extremely talented storyteller, and I'm sad that she left us so soon.
I read all the persepolis comics a long time ago and to my memory it was the first time I cried reading a comic. A beautiful work of art. I would recommend to anyone reading this comment to order the first book.
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...
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.
When I lived in Tehran in the late '70s people said "merci" to express thanks.
They still do.
Yes, it's kind of the standard word for it in Iranian Persian
Armenia as well
yup. shnorhakalutyun is a bit of mouthful :)
A more recent influence came from the Sykes-Picot Agreement [1].
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sykes%E2%80%93Picot_Agreement
Yes, but there are more. For example, French engineers built the Suez Canal.
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.
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.
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.
That she's French-Iranian?
It says so right in the title so I may have misunderstood your question.
Wondering why Iran has so many connections with France which AFAIK never really colonised the place.
Good question. I think maybe it was because a good deal of academics from the Islamic world were educated in France already due to the colonies they did have. Algerians, Tunisians, Syrians, Moroccans, Lebanese... Not an expert so could totally be wrong here, but maybe France put in more effort to incorporate local elites into their own bureaucratic elite system? I imagine there were probably more Muslims in the grande ecoles in France in the 50-60s than in the English elite schools (or US ones for that matter).
Also, I know France practiced (and probably still practices) a good deal of academic "cultural outreach", promoting their culture and especially their language abroad.
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.
Just expanding on this. In hispanic countries we have two last names. One you get from your father side and the other one you get from the mother side. When the first last name is very common like Lopez, Garcia, Perez, etc. it is common practice to keep the second last name when you are talking about them. Otherwise it sounds too plain. Like Gabriel Garcia could be anyone, but Gabriel Garcia Marquez is a renown author.
Downvoted for asking questions. Nice.