Persepolis 2

Description

Sequel to the critically acclaimed Persepolis- the story of Marjane's challenging adolescence as a high-school student in Austria and later as a Western-influenced young art student in Iran. Here is the fascinating and equally unforgettable sequel to Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi's memoir-in-comic strips of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Persepolis ended on a cliffhanger in 1984, just as fourteen-year-old Marjane was leaving behind her home in Tehran, escaping fundamentalism and the war with Iraq to begin a new life in the West. Here we follow our young, intrepid heroine through the next eight years of her life- an eye-opening and sometimes lonely four years of high school in Vienna, followed by a supremely educational and heartwrenching four years back home in Iran. Just as funny and heartbreaking as its predecessor - with perhaps an even greater sense of the ridiculous inspired by life in a fundamentalist state - Persepolis 2 is also as clear-eyed and searing in its condemnation of fundamentalism and its cost to the human spirit. In its depiction of the universal trials of adolescent life and growing into adulthood - here compounded by being an outsider both abroad and at home, and by living in a state where you have no right to show your hair, wear make-up, run in public, date, or question authority - it's raw, honest, and incredibly illuminating.

Marjane Satrapi was born in 1969 in Rasht, Iran. She grew up in Tehran, where she studied at the French school, before leaving for Vienna and Strasbourg to study illustration. She currently lives in Paris and regularly contributes illustrations to newspapers and magazines internationally, including The New Yorker. She is the author of several children's books, as well as the critically acclaimed memoir Persepolis.

In an industry in which female artists can still be counted on the fingers of a yakuza's hand, her deceptively simple and acutely observed black and white memoirs deserve a wide audience -- Dominic Wells * The Times * Like Maus, Persepolis is one of those comic books capable of seducing even those most allergic to the genre... The author's masterstroke is to allow us to experience history from within her family, with irony and tenderness. * Liberation * I cannot praise enough Marjane Satrapi's moving account of growing up as a spirited young girl in revolutionary and war-time Iran. Persepolis is disarming and often humorous but ultimately it is shattering. -- Joe Sacco