Biblioklept

RIP Marjane Satrapi, 19-2026

I was saddened to learn today of the death of the artist Marjane Satrapi. Satrapi was only 56.

Satrapi is probably most recognized for her first published work, Persepolis, a graphic novel she completed in 2003. Persepolis was one of the first books I wrote about on Biblioklept, way back in 2007, when this blog was not half a year old. Here is the entire post:

“It was funny to see how Marx and God looked like each other.”

Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis makes a nice introduction to the graphic novel autobiography for anyone who hasn’t read one before. Marjane’s memoir weaves the political turmoil of the Islamic Revolution with the everyday stuff of childhood experience. As the the repressive Islamic regime revokes liberal freedoms, Marjane’s folks (secular intellectuals, of course) smuggle Iron Maiden posters back from Turkey; young Marjane sneaks cigarettes and rock music to a backdrop of political assassinations and war with Iraq.

Persepolis succeeds by engaging the reader in a personal experience of revolution and cultural alienation. It works as a history lesson and as a coming of age story. Readers who try something different (maybe suspend some prejudices?) will be rewarded with an enriched perspective on a political/cultural upheaval still affecting global politics today.

I wrote that twenty years ago, and there are any number of things I could pick at, I think my defensive tone is the most interesting to me. I think that general audiences have come to understand that comics, just like any other medium, can express the highest ideals of art. Persepolis, now a staple on many school reading lists, contributed to that cultural shift.

I looked around for my copy, but then realized that my daughter took Persepolis with her when she left for college last year. I remember reading the book to her when she was little; later she read it herself. We repeated the process with our son. And then we watched Satrapi’s 2007 film adaptation together a few times.

We also watched her film adaptation of her graphic novel Chicken with Plums. The film is good, but the book is better. My 2009 review of the paperback edition again highlighted an anxiety that mainstream audiences held prejudices against the comics medium:

Casual readers to comics often make the error of supposing that the medium is merely words with accompanying pictures. Satrapi’s deft work here might do wonders in correcting this ignorance. There isn’t a wasted panel in Chicken with Plums, and Satrapi commands intense emotion from her thick, black lines. There’s a seamless quality to Chicken with Plums; the text and the pictures, indivisible, add up to more than the sum of their parts. Satrapi knows when to hold back and let her simple black and white images tell the story. There is a certain economy of storytelling that great comic writers can achieve in ways entirely possible in prose, and here Satrapi has surpassed her earlier work in Persepolis, which, while great, often relied heavily on textual exposition. In Chicken with Plums, Satrapi’s evocations of troubled family life, unfulfilled love, the perils of Iranian immigration to California, and Sufi mysticism all blend into a poignant, often-funny, and occasionally devastating portrait that exemplifies the best of the comics medium.

While comparisons to her Persepolis series will undoubtedly hang over all of Satrapi’s work, Chicken with Plums is a wonderful successor, and in some senses, a more achieved work. Although it doesn’t convey the first-person immediacy of Persepolis, nor that memoir’s dramatic scope, the story of Nasser Ali is intimately detailed and achieves something rare in an age of overstuffed books: it leaves its readers hungry for more.

The plot of Chicken with Plums is devastatingly simple. Nasser Ali, a renowned Iranian musician (and Satrapi’s great uncle), elects to die after his wife destroys his beloved instrument. He quits eating and refuses to leave his bedroom. The story is very much an extrapolation of hazy events revealed in dreams and flashbacks, with a tint of magical realism.

I was a bit taken aback, given the plot of Chicken with Plums, while reading the following detail from Satrapi’s obituary in Le Monde today. The French newspaper reported that those close to the artist declared that, “Marjane Satrapi died of sadness a little over a year after the death of Mattias Ripa, her husband and the love of her life.” How very sad. I hope she has found some peace.