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Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi. This is a "graphic novel," or hardcover comic book. I'm not a huge fan of the genre and this book won't make me one, but the information conveyed is certainly powerful. Satrapi grew up in a fairly liberal household in Iran during the Islamic Revolution; many family members and friends were imprisoned or executed. She has a fairly clear view of herself as a normal kid growing up in abnormal times, which gives one great pause, finally leaving for the west as a teenager -- without her family.
And the fact that it's done in comic book style means that we don't have to ask ourselves whether she can write, which is the real question in Funny in Farsi; a Memoir of Growing Up Iranian in America, by Firoozeh Dumas. Sadly, Dumas' writing leaves much to be desired. Unlike Satrapi's family, Dumas' family was happy enough to leave Iran for Southern California several years before the fall of the Shah. There, they lived a very happy, if silly, life, going from Disneyland to Costco and so forth. Not as funny as she wishes she were nor as interesting as Satrapi, I say skip this one.
Remembering Childhood in the Middle East is a more scholarly work, a collection of essays by people from a number of different middle eastern countries, born throughout the 20th century. The disappointment here is that we don't learn about any one person in any great detail.
Edward Said said that rather than going to sourcebooks like the Koran, people in the U.S. would better inform themselves about Middle Eastern culture and philosophy by reading some of Naguib Mahfouz' works. So that's next for me.
In the meantime, I thoroughly enjoyed the novel Kabul, by M.E. Hirsch, which takes place in Afghanistan in the mid-70s; and The Map of Love, by Ahdaf Soueif, which is about two women, each of whom touch two cultures, inviting understanding of different generations and places.... and it also is a nice love story. Don't be taken in by her other book In the Eye of the Sun, however, as it is quite disappointing after the first.
The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
This is a novel, so it doesn't really fit in this topic, but who cares, since this topic isn't getting much attention anyway...
It's also Hosseini's first novel, and the writing isn't brilliant. I don't mean that he isn't a good writer, he's a perfectly good writer. And the story is a good story, too.
And it takes place against a backdrop of modern Afghanistan history -- the last visit to Afghanistan in the book takes place in March 2001, but the book ends a year later... But it's not so much about the political except to the extent that the personal is political, which of course it is, but.... You won't come away understanding Afghan history the way you will after reading Kabul (mentioned above), but you may have more empathy for the Afghan people....
I generally like first novels, because they're usually so raw and so honest. This one overthinks its story by just the smallest amount, and that makes for a little too much coincidence, and a little too much justice, in the end.
It's sad, too, because there are whole chunks of the book that are wonderful, but then they don't necessarily hang together all that well. Almost like they were written at very different times in the writer's life or edited by different people or something. It's strange.
But it's still a good read.
Another novel
West of the Jordan by Diane Halaby. I liked it, although it was a little too short for my taste and as a result I thought that there were a lot of emotional explorations that were overlooked. Also, it's told from four different perspectives, and I never quite got the hang of the characters, all of whom are writing in the first person including when they are telling other people's stories.
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All meetings end in separation
All acquisition ends in dispersion
All life ends in death
- The Buddha
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Every hundred years, all new people
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