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A review by coffeedog14
The Complete Persepolis: 20th Anniversary Edition by Marjane Satrapi
adventurous
dark
emotional
funny
hopeful
informative
reflective
sad
slow-paced
5.0
This is a novel of unabashed honesty and integrity by an author who is a very different type of person then me. By all rights I should find little to connect to, but it is in the skill and stark reality of her presentation (art and words alike) that I find myself connecting to Satrapi's youth.
Satrapi is stuck, in countless ways, between impossible choices. What kind of woman she wants to be, if she can find love while afraid to accept it, needing to both define herself while remaining close to her family, and the dread of the increasingly important and difficult choice of living in her repressive homeland or an unaccepting foreign one. She wavers, struggling back and forth, rarely finding moments of peace and balance that aren't torn away just as quickly as they arrive.
By the end of the novel, I don't know if Satrapi has found the balance in these choices she's searched for. I don't know if that kind of balance is even possible given the difficulty of the problems offered. What I am confident of, by the end, is that Satrapi is prepared to deal with this uncertainty, to continue defining herself instead of letting others do so, and to know if and when she has found what she's looking for.
Satrapi is stuck, in countless ways, between impossible choices. What kind of woman she wants to be, if she can find love while afraid to accept it, needing to both define herself while remaining close to her family, and the dread of the increasingly important and difficult choice of living in her repressive homeland or an unaccepting foreign one. She wavers, struggling back and forth, rarely finding moments of peace and balance that aren't torn away just as quickly as they arrive.
By the end of the novel, I don't know if Satrapi has found the balance in these choices she's searched for. I don't know if that kind of balance is even possible given the difficulty of the problems offered. What I am confident of, by the end, is that Satrapi is prepared to deal with this uncertainty, to continue defining herself instead of letting others do so, and to know if and when she has found what she's looking for.