I knew this girl. Or at least people just like her. Or maybe that’s just a sign of a good story. Marjane Satrapi is the Iranian—now French—author of Persepolis, a series of delightful autobiographical graphic novels, that had me trying to remember and relate.

Satrapi lived through the fall of the Iranian monarchy, the rise of the ayatollahs, and the Iran-Iraq war—before her middle class parents sent her to a boarding school in Austria. After returning to Iran for college and a little beyond, she leaves for Europe, this time for good.

Her four comics, published in English translation as two volumes, were minor sensations a few years back, and have been recently adapted to film, now out on DVD. I am looking at the books today and the film tomorrow, because there is an important subjective difference between the two—worth a whole discussion of its own.

As to the books:

Satrapi’s story is cute and moving and quite smart, as she discusses global events though the eyes of a little girl: the revolution is initially interpreted for her by her liberal, Europe-vacationing, wine-drinking parents (see below).

As the years proceed, she gains more independent insight into the violent changes in society—witnessing Iraqi bombs; being scolded for immodesty by older women, and so on.

Eventually her big mouth gets her in trouble at school, and her parents decide to send her overseas for high school—for her own safety’s sake. At this point her story becomes part of my story.

Marjane Satrapi is six years older than me, and moved to Austria at just about the same year I moved to Switzerland: different stage of life, similar moment. My parents were working with the Swiss IFES movement, helping develop international student ministry. Especially in the early years, we met quite a few Iranians. By and large, the seemed a lot like Satrapi’s family: modern, far more stylish than my missionary family, polyglot and not at all like the mobs we saw on the evening news.

Satrapi struggles through years of high school in an Austria not inclined to view her as part of the modern world. She’s an exotic creature, even as she slowly adapts many Austrian ways of living.
When she returns, after reaching a crisis point, she has become a “third-culture kid,” belonging nowhere, with a unique culture of her own.

While Persepolis is Marjane Satrapi’s story, and a singular one at that, Satrapi tells the story in terms intensely familiar to anyone who has grown up between worlds. The search for home is probably the central unifying theme in the lives of thousands of such people, torn between cosmopolitan, child-of-all-nations tendencies, and a deep longing to have somewhere to fit in.