Nasser Ali, tortured artist and somewhat unsuccessful father, has little of the tragic hero in him. The art and narration feel too straightforward and familiar to craft an air of larger-than-life storytelling.
Satrapi wants to convey an intimate family moment but also tell the romanticized story of a tragic hero, a poet of music with all the accompanying emotional hang-ups. What we get is a slim piece trying to entwine grand emotionality into a contemporary tale. Through these narrative interludes, we gain a greater sense of who Nasser Ali was and what drove him to such a passive suicide. We read – as uncomfortable voyeurs more than as a disinterested audience – the story of those eight days, which also stretch into his past and future. Unable to find a suitable replacement and incapable of finding an alternative outlet, he lies in his bed for eight days until he expires. It relates the end of her great-uncle’s life, who, after the tar (similar to a Persian sitar) that made him a nationally-renowned musician breaks, consigns himself to die. If nothing else, Satrapi fans from Persepolis should take interest in Chicken with Plums for how she uses those same images and simple, resonant sentences to create an entirely different type of story.Ĭhicken with Plums is a more intimate, private story. And as a piece of realism demystifying a foreign era, Persepolis was unparalleled.Ĭhicken with Plums is a different type of story: it adds Biblically intense passions and a non-linear narrative to the familiar mix of folk-family history and historical storytelling. Her spare, thick-lined drawings, which look like the sophisticated French version of cartoons, brought an air of normality to Iran’s revolutionary era. Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis was an inspired portrayal of a world whose strangeness was matched only by its enduring humanity images made real a world most Americans only knew about tangentially from the news. Graphic history book review: *Chicken with Plums*
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