Persepolis 2 by Marjane Satrapi

Source of book: I own this

 

It’s hard to believe it has been seven years since I read Persepolis. I had intended to return to read the sequel, but time got away from me. 

 

Reading my prior post again, I note that I didn’t say anything specific about the CIA-sponsored coup that ended democracy in Iran in an oil grab. In part, this is because it wasn’t until a few years later that the CIA finally acknowledged its role, and released further documents. That is when I became fully aware of what we did, and how it continues to bear rotten fruit in the Middle East. 

 

And, of course, eager to avoid learning anything from history, the US continues to this day to foment regime change around the world, fucking things up and then complaining about the refugees who want relative peace here. I highly recommend Overthrow by Stephen Kinzer for learning more about this sordid history. 

 

Persepolis 2 picks up where the previous story left off. Marjane, having increasingly rebelled against her Islamacist teachers, has put herself in enough danger that her parents send her to Austria for her high school education. 

 

This book is mostly about that, then her return to Iran afterward, her college education, and her eventual permanent departure for Europe. 

 

As one might imagine, going through puberty and high school while living away from family, in a country where you have to learn a new language (Marjane was already fluent in French, but not German), and where prejudice against Iranians was rampant was…not a great experience. 

 

The author bounced from place to place, eventually ending up homeless and hospitalized for a life-threatening bout of bronchitis. 

 

The book also describes her loneliness, her bad experiences in love, and her difficulties in not fitting in with any culture. It is a particular kind of rootlessness that I myself understand, having been exiled from my faith tradition (as it has embraced fascism and white nationalism) and family of origin (the same, plus sibling favoritism and attempts at control), yet not entirely comfortable or at home outside of that subculture. 

 

There are also some really funny passages in the book. Marjane ends up hanging out with a group of anarchist-leaning punks, mostly because they are willing to accept her. This in turn led to her reading Marx and Sartre - and making snarky comments in the book about both. She did, however, conclude (correctly) that the French Right Wing of Marx’s era were direct analogues to the religious fundamentalists in Iran. 

 

Also hilarious is her description of reading The Second Sex, and being inspired to try peeing standing up. Which went about as well as expected. 

 

As she did as a child in Iran, Marjane found herself getting in trouble with authorities. She just is not the sort to simply take bullshit, shall we say, punching back when she would have been better off just letting it go. Again, I can sympathize here. 

 

After her return to Iran, she finds things have changed even more, with nearly every street being named after a “martyr” - dead soldiers in the long Iran-Iraq war. In order to justify the conflict, the government has created a cult of martyrdom and pushed propaganda about the glorious afterlife. It felt “like walking through a cemetery.” 

 

It was interesting reading this book right after reading Martyr, which is also about the war and the cult of martyrdom. 

 

There is another interesting episode, where Marjane applies to the university, but has to undergo an “Ideological Test,” where a mullah grilled her about religion. 

 

Again, it did not go well, with her pushing back against the rules. “I have always thought that if women’s hair posed so many problems, God would certainly have made us bald.” And insisting that praying to God in Persian was as good as in Arabic. 

 

It turned out, however, that the mullah actually liked her answers because they were honest. As the author puts it, she was lucky to have stumbled on a true religious man. 

 

This line really stuck with me, because I believe that those who are truly seekers of the divine are always like this, prizing honesty and doubt and genuine curiosity. It is the fake-ass power-grubbing bigots who are all about rules and oppressing others and looking down on the unwashed masses. The brood of vipers, as someone famous called them. 

 

In another episode, she pushes back against the rules for dressing that interfere with her creation of art. Again, she gets the true religious man, who helps her find a way to make her point without getting in trouble. This rebellion sparks admiration from her grandmother (who is one of the best characters in both books.) The line that the author attributes to her grandmother is spot on:

 

“It’s fear that makes us lose our conscience. It’s also what transforms us into cowards.” 

 

As a final scene I want to highlight, at one point, Marjane runs to catch a bus she is about to miss. She is stopped by the soldiers, who complain that when she runs, her butt makes “obscene” motions. She yells at them to stop looking at her ass. This stuns enough that they don’t arrest her. 

 

I have made this point at length in my Modesty Culture series. Because it really is the same thing. A man gets a boner thinking about sex, and the woman is blamed for it. It’s the same old misogyny whether it misappropriates Christ or Mohammed for its purposes. 

 

As with the previous book, this one is graphic, told in the format of a graphic novel, except that it is non-fiction. The drawings are delightful throughout, evocative, haunting, and emotionally resonant. 

 

I strongly recommend reading Persepolis first, as the books are part of the same story, and it is best to know what came first. Both are worth reading in any case. 

 

The Third Man by Graham Greene

Source of Book: I own this

 

Somehow, I have never actually read any Graham Greene. I was reminded of this, oddly enough, because he is mentioned in The Ministry of Time as one of the characters, Graham Gore’s, favorite “modern” author. 

 

Somewhere, my wife has a three-in-one book with some of his more serious literary fiction works. I, meanwhile, happened to pick up a library discard of The Third Man a few years ago, so I decided to start with that. 

 

The Third Man is definitely not serious Catholic literary fiction. Rather, it is a thriller. And, it was written as the preparation for the author’s screenplay for the movie of the same name. As he explains in the introduction, because a movie has to have more detail than the words of dialogue in the screenplay, it really needs a more fleshed out world in which to exist. So he started by writing the book, not expecting to publish it. 

 

But he did publish it, after the movie came out. 

 

There are some differences in the plot, which he also discusses a bit in the introduction. They are fairly minor except for the exact ending, which I will not disclose. 

 

The story is definitely noir, and the ending quite dark. It also, unfortunately, draws somewhat on real life events - the black market sale of diluted or fake penicillin that led to senseless deaths, including that of children.  

 

The tale is set in Vienna in the aftermath of World War Two. Divided up among the powers, like Berlin, it is wracked by shortages, violence, and civil unrest. And it is also fertile ground for organized crime. 

 

Pulp Western writer Rollo Martins, a bit down on his luck due to “incidents” involving women - as he says, he was “mixing his drinks” - decides to accept an invitation from school friend Harry Lime to come to Vienna for an “opportunity.” 

 

When he gets there, he finds that Harry has just been killed in an accident with a vehicle. 

 

Something seems off, however, particularly when the British constable, Major Calloway, hints that Harry’s line of work may not have been, strictly speaking, lawful. With Calloway secretly keeping tabs on him, he sets out to investigate what happened to his friend, which leads him into the seedy underworld of the city. 

 

I won’t go beyond that in plot. The movie is considered one of the best of all time, and the book is certainly exciting enough, with some great plot twists. 

 

And also, there is a hilarious scene in the middle of the book that is not exactly connected to the plot, but is one of the best parts. On his way to Vienna, Martins is accosted by a man who mistakes him for a serious literary author who shares the last name of his nom de plume, and who then insists that he come lecture the literary society in Vienna. Which he does, badly indeed. The name dropping of Zane Grey alone is enough to make the scene humorous, but the whole thing is well written. 

 

I wonder if Greene were poking fun a bit at himself - he prided himself on his literary novels, but made his money and fame from his thrillers. 

 

As I said, I won’t spoil the plot, but I do have a few lines that stood out. For example, this one:

 

We never get accustomed to being less important to other people than they are to us. 

 

Ouch. And yes. 

 

I also liked the description of Lime’s girlfriend, the third-rate actress with faulty papers, who is just trying to find safety and a decent life. 

 

She stood there as awkward as himself in a pair of old flannel trousers which had been patched badly in the seat; she stood with her legs firmly straddled as though she were opposing someone and was determined to hold her ground - a small rather stocky figure with any grace she had folded and put away for use professionally. 

 

It is near the end that the bleak, nihilist core of the underworld comes to light. There are a couple of lines that most exemplify this. 

 

“Don’t be melodramatic, Rollo. Look down there,” he went on, pointing through the window at the people moving like black flies at the base of the Wheel. “Would you really feel any pity if one of those dots stopped moving - forever? If I said you can have twenty thousand pounds for every dot that stops, would you really, old man, tell me to keep my money - without hesitation? Or would you calculate how many dots you could afford to spare?” 

 

But the real source of this lack of empathy isn’t just personal. Deep down, it is institutional, just like it is today. Trump and DOGE and the casual choice to end millions of lives due to neglect are the symptom of a longstanding agreement to not care about the destruction that our lifestyles require, the costs that our overabundance impose on other humans less fortunate. 

 

“In these days, old man, nobody thinks in terms of human beings. Governments don’t, so why should we? They talk of the people and the proletariat, and I talk of the mugs. It’s the same thing. They have their five year plans and so have I.” 

 

I am reminded here of so many conversations over the years with American right wingers. At some point, the conversation would come down to “some people should in fact die because they are too poor to afford healthcare, or housing, or food, or a safe place to immigrate to.” At some point, the person ceased to matter, because they were inconvenient. 

 

As the line quoted indicates, it isn’t just the Right that thinks this way, and in other situations - communism in the postwar period was a brutal example - the supposed “common good” justifies mass death. (Solzhenitsyn said that to murder millions takes an ideology - and that is true whether the ideology goes by the name of Right or Left.) But here in the US, right now, it is the Right that dehumanizes and justifies the neglectful extermination of millions in the name of ideology. 

 

Both in the book and in our real world right now, individual lives are seen as expendable in the name of money. What do those little black dots matter compared to trillions in profit? 

 

Is it any wonder that in a society that systematically devalues lives, that all of us can find our lives devalued? 

 

Perhaps the reason the movie (and the book) are so good is that the thrilling noir and exciting plot are combined with that discomfiting question. What is our price? 

 

I will have to read one of Greene’s more literary works, but this was a nice change of pace, a legitimately good thriller with thoughtful questions at its heart.