Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return » (Reprint)

Marjane Satrapi was born in 1969 in Rasht, Iran. She now lives in Paris, where she is a regular contributor to magazines and newspapers throughout the world, including The New Yorker and the New York Times. She is the author of several children's books, as well as the critically acclaimed and internationally best-selling memoir Persepolis, which has been translated into twelve languages, was a New York Times Notable Book, and was awarded the first Fernando Buesa Blanco Peace Prize in Spain and an Alex Award from the American Library Association.

In Persepolis, heralded by the Los Angeles Times as “one of the freshest and most original memoirs of our day,” Marjane Satrapi dazzled us with her heartrending memoir-in-comic-strips about growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Here is the continuation of her fascinating story.
In 1984, Marjane flees fundamentalism and the war with Iraq to begin a new life in Vienna. Once there, she faces the trials of adolescence far from her friends and family, and while she soon carves out a place for herself among a group of fellow outsiders, she continues to struggle for a sense of belonging.

Finding that she misses her home more than she can stand, Marjane returns to Iran after graduation. Her difficult homecoming forces her to confront the changes both she and her country have undergone in her absence and her shame at what she perceives as her failure in Austria. Marjane allows her past to weigh heavily on her until she finds some like-minded friends, falls in love, and begins studying art at a university. However, the repression and state-sanctioned chauvinism eventually lead her to question whether she can have a future in Iran.

As funny and poignant as its predecessor, Persepolis 2 is another clear-eyed and searing condemnation of the human cost of fundamentalism. In its depiction of the struggles of growing up—here compounded by Marjane’s status as an outsider both abroad and at home—it is raw, honest, and incredibly illuminating.

The Washington Post - Tara Bahrampour

Rendered in stark, woodcut-like panels, the books captured attention in the United States and Europe partly because they shed light on an era when Iran was too closed to outsiders and too dangerous for Iranians to be depicted with any real depth. Through personal, often painful anecdotes, Satrapi explains how the Westernized country of the shah was transformed so quickly into a surreal world of doublespeak and double lives.