Iran

The Enthusiast: Column 5

By Isaac Butler

Ever since President Bush’s infamous “Axis of Evil” speech, war with Iran has never fully retreated from the national consciousness. Seymour Hersh has published multiple exposés, in the pages of The New Yorker, about the existing plans to attack Iran, while John McCain joked about bombing Iran at a campaign stop. In the early primaries, none of the major Democratic candidates for President would take attacking Iran “off the table,” and Hillary Clinton recently spoke of massive retaliations, should Iran attack Israel. Meanwhile, Iran’s President, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, speaks of wiping Israel off the map while defying the UN over Iran’s nuclear energy programs. In this context, we need more compelling and insightful accounts of Iran’s politics and culture. Two recent books, Christopher de Bellaigue’s The Struggle for Iran and The Complete Persepolis by Marjane Satrapi, try to fill that gap, with mixed results.

The Struggle for Iran collects articles that de Bellaigue–a British-born, Persian-speaking journalist who lives in Tehran–wrote over the last decade for the New York Review of Books. The essays come in a variety of forms, from reviews to profiles of young Iranians and political analysis, and in a voice that is personable and compelling. De Bellaigue does his readers a real service by explaining the rather complicated, largely state-owned economy and dizzying political structures of Iran.

Despite this, The Struggle For Iran is distinctly less than the sum of its parts. Redundant information crops up in several chapters. The essay Big Deal recounts in detail the 2003-2004 Nuclear Standoff between Iran and the West, but other articles contain nearly identical material. There’s no attempt made to tie together the threads of the various articles in a way that links them and creates a satisfying narrative. As a result, the book feels like the source material for any number of better books that de Bellaigue is clearly capable of writing: a memoir of his time in Tehran, say, or a portrait of the short-lived reform movement and the broader implications for U.S. and Iranian foreign policy.

Although it contains interesting information for anyone who wishes to better understand present-day Iran, The Struggle For Iran becomes an increasingly frustrating book, offering its readers nothing they couldn’t get with a subscription to The New York Review of Books, where the essays were initially published. Christopher de Bellaigue is a much-needed voice in America’s conversation about Iran, but The Struggle for Iran, in its failure to function as a whole work, is not the best vehicle for that voice.

Persepolis is a far better-known work. Marjane Satrapi’s best-selling comic book memoir has been turned into an award-winning and critically acclaimed feature film, and has been a staple on book club reading lists since it first came out in 2003. Originally written in French, Persepolis traces the first few decades of Satrapi’s life, from being a child during the Iranian Revolution to leaving for Europe, coming back, and then leaving again. Tagging along for her journey, we meet her family, many friends, a few boyfriends, a first husband, dictatorial teachers, underground progressives, Kim Wilde music, and terrifying Revolutionary Guards with their formidable beards and draconian punishments.

Satrapi gives readers a first-person perspective that is a nice compliment to de Bellague’s wide-angle musings, and taken together, the books echo off each other and deepen each other nicely. The drawing style is stark and simple, reminiscent of wood-cuts, with lots of use of negative space. Although it prioritizes minimal storytelling, Satrapi still achieves an evocative visual poetry that frequently communicates subtext and symbolism. She is also a wry comedian, portraying her callow youth with humor and understanding.

Although it is good and definitely worth reading, Persepolis is not without problems. When Satarpi goes to Europe for the first time, most of the oxygen is sucked right out of the book and does not return until she makes it back to her homeland. While the interplay of image and text is frequently delightful, it doesn’t really compare to trailblazing works of comic book journalism, like Joe Sacco’s Palestine, or graphic memoirs like Craig Thompson’s Blankets. In order to convey as much information in as brisk a manner as possible, scenes between characters are regularly rendered as expository stand-ins for real dialogue.

It’s hard to shake the feeling that Persepolis was hailed as an important comic book work by people who don’t read comics and were surprised to find out that they can be just as accessible and powerful as “regular” books. That it is still necessary to prove this more than a decade after Art Spiegelman’s Maus won the Pulitzer Prize is odd, to say the least. This is not to say there is anything particularly wrong with Persepolis–there isn’t. It is a really solid work: funny, poignant, insightful and well-drawn. It just is not, as Time Magazine claims on the back of the book, “totally unique and indispensable.”

It is by far the better book of the two, however, and anyone looking for a first-person glimpse into Iranian society can declare their search over. Ultimately, both of these works raise the following question: By what standards should they be judged? Judged by the standard of informing readers about the Iranian context to recent world events, The Struggle for Iran is valuable. Viewed by the standards of its quality as a book, it is severely lacking. Persepolis is “unique and indispensable” as a treatment of its subject matter, but not when compared to other comic books. Nonfiction can get away with this in a way that fiction cannot. Fiction informs our view of the world through its stylistic elegance and perception (just ask Oscar Wilde), while nonfiction alters our view of the world through the information it imparts. Nonfiction works do not necessarily have to be beautiful, formally well-thought-out, or even compelling, so long as what they have to tell you has value. Luckily, The Complete Persepolis has enough to offer a reader on both fronts to be a satisfying (if not revelatory) read.

Read more from Isaac Butler at his blog Parabasis.