There’s a seamless quality to Chicken with Plums the text and the pictures, indivisible, add up to more than the sum of their parts. There isn’t a wasted panel in Chicken with Plums, and Satrapi commands intense emotion from her thick, black lines. Satrapi’s deft work here might do wonders in correcting this ignorance.

Instead, Chicken plumbs loss and love, art and passion, family and disappointment, and the ways in which the small comforts in life–a favorite meal of say, chicken with plums, or a Sophia Loren flick, ultimately offer no protection against death.Ĭasual readers to comics often make the error of supposing that the medium is merely words with accompanying pictures. Although the context of the recentish 1953 CIA-backed coup informs the plot, Chicken with Plums is far less concerned with Iranian politics than was the book that made her famous, her stunning debut graphic novel, Persepolis. Ali’s life story–and the reasons for his slow suicide–are revealed in a series of dreams, fantasies, flashbacks (and flashbacks within flashbacks!), and even a few flash forwards. Satrapi organizes her narrative around Ali’s last eight days alive in November, 1958–from the time he decides to quit eating and not leave his bedroom, to his eventual, somewhat unexplained death. In Chicken with Plums, new in paperback from Pantheon, acclaimed author Marjane Satrapi tells the story of the life and death of her great uncle Nasser Ali, a renowned Iranian tar player who decides to die after his wife destroys his beloved instrument.

Chicken with Plums by Marjane Satrapi