Book Review: Persepolis, by Marjane Satrapi

I'd wanted to read Persepolis for quite some time, even before I saw the film. I had vague intentions of getting it out of the library, but my to-get-from-the-library list is about a mile long and has to compete for attention with all the books I own. Happily, I got given a copy as part of a Secret Santa, so it managed to jump the library queue. Yay!

Persepolis is a (slightly-fictionalised according to various sources) memoir in two parts, which were originally published in French. The edition I have from Vintage Books collects both parts in a trade paperback, but it is also available from Pantheon Books in a larger format. The first part, 'The Story of a Childhood', follows the author's childhood in Iran, following the Islamic Revolution and exploring how her everyday life was altered. She becomes more and more rebellious when she reaches her teens, and her parents decide that she will be safer and happier if she goes away to school in Austria, which is where the second part begins. 'The Story of a Return' is about her experiences in Austria, and her decision to return to Iran.

Successful memoirs feel honest, and Persepolis certainly does. Marjane Satrapi shows herself and the people she loves as flawed human beings, and therefore I found it easy to trust her impressions of people who treat her or other people badly. Persepolis balances the serious, unflinching depictions of wars and revolutions with humour and details about her family life - I cried a couple of times but I laughed a lot more.

I loved all the little snippets of Iran's history. The school curriculum in the UK treats British history as if it's the history of the whole world, while simultaneously leaving out most of the parts of British history that are actually important to world history, ie. all the unsavoury details about the British Empire. I feel like there is a shamefully huge gap in my knowledge and I actually really enjoy learning about history when it's not confined to the World Wars. What is great about Persepolis is that the historical details are interwoven with the author's life - they are things that she learnt about in childhood, or that she explains briefly to the reader so that the surrounding parts of the story make sense. It made me want to find out more.

I started reading Persepolis when I was ill - I was feeling dizzy and wanted something that would be easy to follow, and that would take my mind off of all the things that I was incapable of getting on with. It was the perfect choice, and has left me with a craving for more graphic memoirs. If you have any recommendations, please leave me a comment!

Book Review: Valencia, by Michelle Tea

Michelle Tea gives some background to her memoirs and talks about her move into writing fiction.

Valencia is a memoir by Michelle Tea, about her time living in San Francisco, falling in and out of love with a succession of girls, going to various nightclubs, parties and gay pride marches, and losing several jobs. It's split into chapters but is told in quite a stream-of-consciousness style - she'll start out telling one story but will diverge into telling us umpteen other people's stories in between. I wouldn't read this if you require a plot to get along with a book, because the narrative here isn't going anywhere, it's just a continuous description of things that happen and people the author knows.

I wasn't expecting to laugh a lot whilst reading Valencia, but although some parts were sad and some of the people described were troubled, other parts were hilarious. There are so many strange but still very real characters, and the author tells us what she was thinking at these times in her life in a really deadpan way. For example, at one point, she has a job at a courier company, and she wants to lose it, but they won't fire her. The way she talks about why she won't just quit, rationalising what doesn't make sense at all, is so ridiculous I couldn't help but laugh out loud.

I thought the introduction to this edition was particularly interesting (I studied life writing - nerd alert), because Michelle Tea writes about how writing about her own life has frozen it in time. With time and distance, we view things that happened to us differently, and she says this process has happened slowly for her, because when she performs extracts from the book, she has to inhabit the way she felt at the time, and cling onto it.

Valencia was easy to read but not absolutely compelling - it would probably be more interesting for people who are involved in similar 'scenes', and who have more in common with the ambitionless, hedonistic characters. I'm not sure whether I'll read it again,  but it has reminded me of how interesting the everyday can be when described with intelligence and humour.

Three Non-Fiction Suggestions

Ophelia Speaks: Adolescent Girls Write About Their Search for Self, edited by Sara Shandler, various contributors

Ophelia Speaks is a response to an earlier book, Reviving Ophelia, and contains short essays, poetry, and other pieces of writing by American teenagers. There are two chapters about body issues, 'Media-Fed Images' and 'Eating Disorders'. The pieces are very short but it's interesting to see a range of snapshots from different lives, and what real teenagers think about their bodies. The rest of the book features pieces of writing about other issues affecting teenagers today, on subjects like abuse, depression, death, friendship, sex, racism, religion, and academic pressure.

The Beauty Myth: How Images of Beauty are Used Against Women, by Naomi Wolf

I'll confess I haven't read the whole of this book yet - I read the first chapter, the last, 'Culture' and 'Hunger' for an essay I wrote whilst studying for my first degree. I do intend to read the rest soon. The Beauty Myth is a look at history, politics and advertising that shows how false the idea of beauty is and how it stops women from achieving as much as they could. It's not perfect, it has received a lot of criticism for only really looking at how the beauty myth affects middle-class, white, heterosexual and able-bodied women, and the accuracy of the statistics is often called into question. I'm aware that there are books and articles that go a bit more in depth and up to date, but as an intro to the ideas it presents, I think it does a good job. The third to last paragraph of the 'Hunger' chapter, beginning 'What if she doesn't worry about her body and eats enough for all the growing she has to do?' (p179-180 in 0701134313) is one of my favourite paragraphs of all time. I wish I could quote the whole thing here, but it'd probably go beyond fair dealing.

Wasted, by Marya Hornbacher

I'm reading this book at the moment and will post a full review when I'm done. It's a memoir by a recovering bulimic/anoretic. The author first decided that she was fat at the age of five. It's well written, but quite heavy going. My head was aching earlier today as I was reading it, just trying to imagine how a child so young would develop these ideas and become so ill. Also, although it's not a thick paperback, the font is quite small, so it's not ideal for reading with contacts in. I might have a better time tomorrow when I can just take my glasses off and hold it closer!

Book Review: Geisha of Gion, by Mineko Iwasaki

Before reading Arthur Golden's Memoirs of a Geisha, I read a magazine interview with Mineko Iwasaki, who was interviewed extensively by Golden as part of his research. The interview mentioned that Iwasaki was suing Golden for misrepresenting her and the geisha. The geisha in his novel are highly-paid prostitutes as well as graceful entertainers, which was not Iwasaki's reality, although it may have been for other geisha. She sounded like an interesting person, so after reading and enjoying Memoirs, I bought Geisha of Gion.

If you read both books, you will see a great similarity between the fictional life of Sayuri, and the reality of Mineko Iwasaki. Their childhoods and careers as geisha are almost identical. Ultimately, although Golden's tale is more dramatic, rich with imagery, and emotionally evoking, I preferred Iwasaki's memoirs, as I felt they provided more of a fascinating look into the real world of the geisha (or geiko, as Iwasaki explains they were called in her society), as well as an explanation for their shrinking place in the modern world.

The real woman is not so preoccupied by love as her fictional counterpart, she is more career-minded, but she is not wholly serious. One of my favourite parts of this memoir is about when she decided to move out of her geiko house, leaving her servants and adoptive family, and barely knew how to survive in her own flat.
Some readers see Mineko Iwasaki as arrogant, but I disagree. I think she is simply proud of her achievements and talks about them to show how much she gave up when retired. Iwasaki had a very high social status inside the world of the geisha, and achieved fame, but outside it meant nothing, and although she tried to change this, she was unsuccessful. She retired young, dissatisfied and disappointed.

This is an interesting and at times very funny book. I would recommend it particularly to those who read and enjoyed Memoirs of a Geisha.

Book Review: Straight Up and Dirty, by Stephanie Klein

When I was given this book, I had never heard of the author and hadn't read any press releases. Nobody said a thing about it within my hearing. So all I had to go on was the name. "Straight Up and Dirty". I cringed. I'd never found sex memoirs appealing, and I could just imagine what lurked between the covers. I anticipated jaw-dropping detail, so elaborate I'd get bored and watch the news instead that evening.

However, I read it all the way through, and at the end I felt somewhat short-changed. This book is not dirty. Whoever came up with the title has a really low smut threshold. It's not all that straight-up either, and I don't think it says anything new about relationships.

Although it wasn't a bad read, and I did make it through to the end without getting bored, there was just nothing standout about it, nothing to really make it worth my time. It's not difficult to read, and can be enjoyable in places, but overall it's clichéd and doesn't make any sort of interesting statement. The author jumps about when telling her story, and tries to be funny (calling her ex-husband "the wasband"), but ultimately falls flat. I found the ending to be vague and inconclusive. Klein dates some men, dates some more men, is miserable on and off, finally enrols in a photography class, and then stops being miserable and starts being contented, with no real explanation as to why or how. I would have found it much more interesting if she'd charted how her self-satisfaction started to improve, and included some reflection on it. It's alright for what it is, but I saw potential in it for more.