From: Ginny Moore Kruse <gmkruse>
Date: Tue, 13 Apr 2004 11:55:33 -0500

I'm glad to see your reference to "Persepolis," Hollis, because I've been thinking about that stunning graphic autobiography ever since this CCBC-Net discussion began.

ALA's Young Adult Library Services Association (YALSA) just announced that "Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood" by Marjane Satrapi
(Pantheon, 2003; pbk. ed. expected soon) is one of the ten books named a 2004 "Alex Award Winner," i.e., an adult book that will appeal to teen readers. "Persepolis" was also named as one of the 84 YALSA "Best Books for Young Adults," the committee to which Kathy Isaacs referred earlier today.

Yesterday I reread "Persepolis" in preparation for a discussion last evening of another book, "Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books" by Azar Nafisi (Random House, hardcover & pbk.) "Reading Lolita..." offers important challenging prose observations of the impact of the decade immediately following the one chronicled in "Persepolis." It's also a tribute to the significance of the insights resulting from reading and discussing fiction. (By the way, "Reading Lolita..." puts to rest any notion that the Iranian girls and women currently forced to be
"covered" in public lack personal preferences for clothing, literature, and intimate relationships; they are as individually distinct as any other females whose personal choices can be publicly evident.)

If "Persepolis" were one's only source of information about contemporary Persia, a reader probably wouldn't realize that Iranian girls and women have personal preferences. The text must also be read in this graphic autobiography, just as it probably must be read in the other "graphic" books we're talking about this month. In "Persepolis" Satrapi recreates her own childhood perception of what she saw and overheard more than 20 years ago in Iran. School and family experiences were shrouded - even before women were required to wear public shrouds - by mystery and by sudden terrifying displays of authority. Like any child anywhere at any time, she had to piece together what might be true from all she saw and was told. The visual images in "Persepolis" show this distinctive feisty girl in both thought and action. Readers experience her bewilderment by and awakening to injustice precisely because of the black and white images so expressively emerging midst images of enforced sameness. Readers must piece together what's in the carefully composed text and the accompanying the black and white images. Those visually graphic imagines literally jump off pages where initially one is struck by visual sameness. However Satrapi cleverly created visual ways for readers to identify her childhood self, her mother, and other females significant to her personal story. "Persepolis" is a moving, personal, memorable and graphic account of growing up in late th Century Persia. Make that "graphic" in more than one sense of the word.

There's an enormous benefit to experiencing Satrapi's autobiography in this particular graphic form. It's going to become a classic entry in Child in War bibliographies from now on, in addition to its unique insights into the experience of childhood within a repressive regime. If you haven't had a chance to see it yet, I encourage you to put it on your personal "must read" list. (That's in addition to adding
"Persepolis" to a list of books to buy for public library Y.A. and adult collections, and for middle school and H.S. libraries.) A paperback edition of "Persepolis" will be published at the end of May. "Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return" is expected in bookstores at the end of August.

Peace, Ginny


Ginny Moore Kruse gmkruse at education.wisc.edu
Received on Tue 13 Apr 2004 11:55:33 AM CDT