Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return

Persepolis 2: The Story of a Return
written and illustrated by Marjane Satrapi. 2004. New York: Pantheon Books. (0375714669).

Media: pen and ink

Author/Illustrator Website: none

Awards and Honors: Angoulême International Comics Festival Prize for Scenario

Annotation:
Marjane Satrapi's follow up to the award-winning graphic novel Persepolis- it follows her from the ages of 14 to 24 as she endures the trials and tribulations of young adulthood, life as an exile, and making her place in the world.

 Personal Reaction:

     I loved Persepolis so I was very excited to read Satrapi's follow-up to the story of her rebellious childhood in revolutionary Iran during the 1970s and 1980s. In Persepolis, Satrapi was the politically precocious child of a progressive family- by Persepolis 2, Marjane is older, more pessimistic and confused about her identity. The book cover 10 years of Marjane's life, beginning when at the age of 14 she is sent to Austria to escape the dangers of war in Iran. She plans to stay with her mother's good friend, but when that doesn't work out she ends up bouncing from house to dorm to apartment. She struggles with her identity as a maturing woman and as a outsider in a foreign land. Her experiences growing up in Iran are completely unrelatable to her peers and she finds it hard to be comfortable in any social group. Moreover, she desperately misses the comfort of her family but doesn't think her feelings are valid, because her parents are experiencing the devastation of war in her home country. She's cut off from family, has no real friends and has no one to care for her. Marjane finally ending up living on the streets after the devastating break up of her first romantic relationship. It's winter time and Marjane becomes dangerously ill. She's sent to a hospital and when she recovers, she asks her parents if she can come home to Iran.

     When she returns to Iran she must deal with the trauma of her experiences in Austria and negotiate her cultural identity. She has spent her formative teenage years in the West and now no longer feels that she fits in within her home country. She's not completely a westerner, but no longer an Iranian. Persepolis 2 is the story of how Satrapi loses her identity and finds herself reborn. Where Persepolis was political, Persepolis 2 is personal- it's more focused on advancing the narrative than making grand, universal statements but it's nonetheless a worthy companion to her first volume.