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Book Review: Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi

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I’d wanted to read Persepolis for quite some time, even before I saw the film. I had vague intentions of getting it out of the library, but my to-get-from-the-library list is about a mile long and has to compete for attention with all the books I own. Happily, I got given a copy as part of a Secret Santa, so it managed to jump the library queue. Yay!

Persepolis is a (slightly-fictionalised according to various sources) memoir in two parts, which were originally published in French. The edition I have from Vintage Books collects both parts in a trade paperback, but it is also available from Pantheon Books in a larger format. The first part, ‘The Story of a Childhood’, follows the author’s childhood in Iran, following the Islamic Revolution and exploring how her everyday life was altered. She becomes more and more rebellious when she reaches her teens, and her parents decide that she will be safer and happier if she goes away to school in Austria, which is where the second part begins. ‘The Story of a Return’ is about her experiences in Austria, and her decision to return to Iran.

Successful memoirs feel honest, and Persepolis certainly does. Marjane
Satrapi shows herself and the people she loves as flawed human beings,
and therefore I found it easy to trust her impressions of people who
treat her or other people badly. Persepolis balances the serious, unflinching depictions of wars and revolutions with humour and details about her family life – I cried a couple of times but I laughed a lot more.

I loved all the little snippets of Iran’s history. The school curriculum in the UK treats British history as if it’s the history of the whole world, while simultaneously leaving out most of the parts of British history that are actually important to world history, ie. all the unsavoury details about the British Empire. I feel like there is a shamefully huge gap in my knowledge and I actually really enjoy learning about history when it’s not confined to the World Wars. What is great about Persepolis is that the historical details are interwoven with the author’s life – they are things that she learnt about in childhood, or that she explains briefly to the reader so that the surrounding parts of the story make sense. It made me want to find out more.

I started reading Persepolis when I was ill – I was feeling dizzy and wanted something
that would be easy to follow, and that would take my mind off of all the
things that I was incapable of getting on with. It was the perfect
choice, and has left me with a craving for more graphic memoirs. If you have any recommendations, please leave me a comment!

Book Review: Valencia, by Michelle Tea

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Michelle Tea gives some background to her memoirs and talks about her move into writing fiction.

Valencia is a memoir by Michelle Tea, about her time living in San Francisco, falling in and out of love with a succession of girls, going to various nightclubs, parties and gay pride marches, and losing several jobs. It’s split into chapters but is told in quite a stream-of-consciousness style – she’ll start out telling one story but will diverge into telling us umpteen other people’s stories in between. I wouldn’t read this if you require a plot to get along with a book, because the narrative here isn’t going anywhere, it’s just a continuous description of things that happen and people the author knows.

I wasn’t expecting to laugh a lot whilst reading Valencia, but although some parts were sad and some of the people described were troubled, other parts were hilarious. There are so many strange but still very real characters, and the author tells us what she was thinking at these times in her life in a really deadpan way. For example, at one point, she has a job at a courier company, and she wants to lose it, but they won’t fire her. The way she talks about why she won’t just quit, rationalising what doesn’t make sense at all, is so ridiculous I couldn’t help but laugh out loud.

I thought the introduction to this edition was particularly interesting (I studied life writing – nerd alert), because Michelle Tea writes about how writing about her own life has frozen it in time. With time and distance, we view things that happened to us differently, and she says this process has happened slowly for her, because when she performs extracts from the book, she has to inhabit the way she felt at the time, and cling onto it.

Valencia was easy to read but not absolutely compelling – it would probably be more interesting for people who are involved in similar ‘scenes’, and who have more in common with the ambitionless, hedonistic characters. I’m not sure whether I’ll read it again,  but it has reminded me of how interesting the everyday can be when described with intelligence and humour.