Chicken With Plums

A friend of mine, Marjane Satrapi, is in the United States this week. She grew up in Iran, so we can be happy she's willing to come. In her epic graphic memoir, Persepolis, she recorded her life during the revolution, when her family opposed both the Shah and the clerics who came to power in his wake. Marjane is not the sort of person to tell people what they want to hear, so her parents decided that Iran was too dangerous for her. Marjane now has French citizenship, but every time she crosses the border to the U.S. she's subjected to a 2-3 hour interrogation. She jokes that it would be more efficient just to be given a yellow star.

She's come to the states to promote her new book, Chicken With Plums. She's giving a reading tonight at Barnes and Noble in New York City, and will be in DC, Minneapolis, and points westward. I wanted to give her a plug not only because she's a friend, but also because Chicken With Plums is one of the most remarkable books I've ever read.

The comic book opens with a shopping trip. Nasser Ali Khan is looking for a new tar, a stringed instrument that looks like an elongated mandolin. He cannot find what he wants. The wood of each instrument is too dry, the sound too dull, the feel all wrong. None resonates with the music of his old tar, and so he decides to die. Did I mention it was a dark book?

We then watch Nasser Ali Khan in the last eight days of his life, days spent in memory of pleasure: his tar teacher, his wife, Sophia Loren, the succulent chicken with plums that his mother made with caramelized onions and tumeric. And so this book about death turns out to be a meditation on what keeps us alive, what music plays in us. It is graphic poetry, and recalls a line by Edgar Lee Masters: "The earth keeps some vibration going/there in your heart, and that is you." It could be an evidence for twiffer's arguments about art.

Persepolis was an epic work of revolution, war, and exile. In Marjane's next book, Embroideries she found a way to draw a conversation (better: she found a way to draw a conversation about sex). Chicken With Plums is probably my favorite, not least because of its image of Death reciting Khayyam:

Whoe'er returned of all that went before
To tell of that long road they travel o'er
Leave naught undone of what you have to do..
For when you go, you will return no more."

Such is Marjane's artistry that as he recites the lines, even Death looks rueful.