Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return and Embroideries.(Book Review)

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return and Embroideries

By Marjane Satrapi (Pantheon Books, 2004 and 2005)

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return is the follow-up to Marjane Satrapi's international best-seller Persepolis, which detailed her childhood in revolutionary Iran. This second graphic book picks up in 1984 and finds the author fleeing the Iran-Iraq War for what she hopes will be a more liberating life in Vienna. Instead, she finds herself searching for friendship and love, all along trying to figure out whether a future in the heavily fundamentalist Iran is possible.

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Once again, Satrapi relies on her sense of humor to make her socio-political arguments, as in one chapter where she and a German roommate must resort to drawing diagrams in order to understand one another. Invariably, this brief exchange serves to illustrate Satrapi's "foreign" status both in her native country of Iran and now in this second country. More amusingly, because Satrapi's adventures in Vienna take place during her teenage years, we get to witness the physical transformation of her character and girl body. In an aptly titled chapter, "The Vegetable," Satrapi writes how she grew an astounding seven inches between the ages of 15 and 16 and then proceeds to take us on a more elaborate explanation of her other growth spurts, which include the elongation of her face and the repositioning of her beauty mark.