Chicken with Plums, Marjane Satrapi's newest work, is a rambling tale of the end of the life of a frustrated musician in 1950s Iran. Satrapi's graphic novels, which have all taken place in Iran, have put her in the spotlight of a growing medium of serious graphic novels.

This past November, Satrapi drew a graphic essay for the New York Times website in which she extolled the virtues of smoking. In the essay, she wrote that smoking was one of the few things in life which gave her pleasure, and that in a world of unhealthy food and violent video games, people should be able to make their own choices about life or death. If she were to give in to the pressure not to express herself, "no writer will have the right to write about death or despair or suicide or broken hearts or what have you because some people will be influenced." The comic is beautifully drawn, with pictures of women smoking and chatting together, in bed, or with frazzled hair next to a pet cat. Satrapi took up a contentious topic with an approach which toed the line between charm and frivolity. The reader responses showed it—the New York Times received hundreds of outraged comments, many of relatives of cancer victims expressing their dismay.

Causing trouble here, it is this same light-hearted tact which has made Satrapi so likeable in the past. The author has a talent for the small details which manage to evoke small essences in the face of events of enormous historical importance. In Perspepolis, her break out work depicting a childhood in revolutionary Iran, Satrapi set a discussion of Iran-Iraq War casualties at a hairdresser's parlor, and a conversation of the merits of dialectical materialism in the kitchen, while making hot chocolate with a long lost uncle.

Persepolis, first published in French in 2000, is the first person narrative of the Iranian revolution seen through the eyes of a young girl. Satrapi was nine at the time of the 1979 Islamic Revolution, and she grows up as the veil is introduced, schools are segregated, and cinemas are burned. The story closes to a close as she is sent off to finish her education at a Swiss boarding school, leaving her family behind.

In her signature understated black and white style, of small image boxes with small characters which look more like embellished stick figures than full people, Satrapi deftly dealt with large families, love between the social classes, and the Zoroastrian roots of modern Iran. At the time of its release, Persepolis was often compared to Art Spiegelman's Maus, the graphic novel depicting the Jewish Holocaust. In the two volume work finished in 1991, Spiegelman plays himself, a second generation survivor struggling to understand the Holocaust experiences of his father, Vladick Spiegelman. Maus brought graphic novels into our intellectual mainstream. Academics read comics for the first time as they found works of literature which could approach serious topics.

Persepolis was full of similar themes—an outsider recalling the time of troubles; the retelling of history; the clashes of culture, religion, and ethnicity. If Satrapi lacked some of Spiegelman's arresting artistic allegory (his Jews were depicted as mice, and his Germans as cats) she brought a compelling personal narrative and easy-to-follow story line to the growing medium.

Chicken with Plums is set much earlier than Persepolis, in 1958, during the rule of the American-backed Shah, who was in power until the 1979 Revolution. The book recounts the story of Nasser Ali Khan, a well-regarded musician who plays the Tar, a tall Iranian string instrument. Nasser Ali is middle-aged and lives in Tehran with his wife, Nahid, and their four children. The tale begins when Nahid, in an argument, breaks Nasser Ali's Tar over her knee. Nasser Ali looks unsuccessfully for a new Tar all over Iran, but finds none to his liking. Unable to play his music, he decides to stop living altogether. The scope of the story takes place over the next week, until Nasser Ali dies.

As Nasser Ali lays on his bed, committed to dying, he is consoled by his children and siblings, and we see backward into his childhood, and forward into the lives of his children, some of whom emigrate to America. Moving backward and forward in time, we encounter the full scope of Nasser Ali's life.

While Chicken with Plums is full of charming incidents and anecdotes, it lacks clear direction and purpose. Satrapi's tale never truly comes together. How is Nasser Ali's unwillingness to live a symbol? If it is indeed symbolic, of what? Of the difficulties of Iranian life? Of the pride of a stubborn man? We never really learn.

Without the broad scope and political significance present in Sartapi's earlier works, it is hard to find a compelling set of themes behind the story. Nevertheless, Satrapi is successful at capturing life's detailed intricacies. She executes them delicately, as with a fight between Nasser Ali and his wife Nahid, and Nasser Ali's memories of his mother's death.

On the third day of Nasser Ali's march to death, as he lays stubble-laden in bed, smoking cigarettes and daydreaming about the food he would like to eat, Nahid announces she is serving "chicken with plums." Even as they sit down to dinner, the couple cannot put the past behind them. When Nahid complains that she has to do all the chores, Nasser Ali says that "you married a musician, not a laborer," and she says, "I hate you, and I hate your music." The married couple is captured in their fullest possible rage and disagreement. This is the best drawn scene in the book, as delectable Iranian specialties fall before our eyes and through the semi-conscious mind of Nasser Ali.

In another well-executed scene, Nasser Ali lays on his deathbed and thinks back to his own mother's death fifteen years earlier. The son prayed for his mother to live. On her deathbed she asks him to stop praying, and to simply play his Tar and make beautiful music for her throughout the day. He follows her commands, and she dies soon after. The great dervishes of Tehran come to the mother's funeral, introducing imagery of traditional pre-Islamic Iranian folklore, including of Azrael, the Angel of Death. This is the same angel that comes to Nasser Ali, bringing his death, one week after he proclaimed his intentions to die. Thus, the tale comes to an end.

If Satrapi's hairdressing parlor led us to understand the Iran-Iraq war, or if her conversations with her uncle led us to better understand dialectical materialism, it was because her musings were set in the historically important period of Iran 's tumultuous revolution. Satrapi's spunky charm was used well in that setting, and in Chicken with Plums, it lacks a certain urgency. In Persepolis, Satrapi was a strong first person narrator, a young girl witnessing the end of the world. This tale has neither a winning plot nor the personal narrative nor historical gravitas which make her earlier work so compelling. No doubt Satrapi will continue to provoke—her work in the New York Times shows us as much—but if she is to truly follow in Spiegelman's footsteps as the patron saint of the intellectual graphic novel, she will have to keep trying.

 

Noah Hertz-Bunzl is an aspiring historian whose interests include culture, migration, nationalism, violence, and terrorism and its many causes.