Chicken with Plums [Paperback]

It's easy to be disappointed in this book if you expect something of the scale and depth of the author's "Persepolis." But Satrapi has set out to tell a different kind of story in this book, and judging by that, I'd say she has come much closer to succeeding than some reviews here might suggest. Telling her story twice, first from an outsider's point of view and then from the perspective of the main character, Satrapi gives a postmodern twist to her material. And filling in what were surely the scant details of a life she could only have known second- or third-hand, she joins a well-established genre of creative nonfiction.

If the book can be faulted, it's that the material is so rich and cries out for much fuller treatment. In its few pages, you want to know more about these characters so that they spring in three dimensions from the flat comic-strip world they inhabit. This may have more to do with the limitations of the graphic novel than Satrapi's storytelling itself. I have no reservations recommending this book for what it reveals of lives lived in a culture that is both familiar and very different and its comically sad story of a self-absorbed man so disappointed with his world that he wills his own death.

Drawn in bold black and white, Marjane Satrapi's graphic novel illustrates the moving and disturbing life and last days of her uncle, Nasser Ali Kahn. He was a famous Iranian musician, loved for his virtuosity, and the sensitivity with which he played his beloved tar.

It's a tale of how a man's happiness was gradually eroded by his culture, loss, suppressed feelings, and unrealizable expectations.

The story starts with an older man in black walking down a city street. He encounters a slender woman with her grandchild. He hesitates. Asks if her name is Irane. She doesn't recognize him. Wonders how he knows her name. He, Nasser, apologizes and walks on to a friends business where he hopes to buy a replacement for his recently broken tar.

We later learn that the broken tar had special meaning for Nasser. When he was a young man, the parents of the woman he'd fallen in love with forbade her to marry him because he was only a musician. Losing her plunged him into deep depression. He had difficulty playing. Nasser's tar master tried to console him by telling him, "To the common man, whether you're a musician or a clown, it's one and the same. The love you feel for this woman will translate into your music. She will be in every note you play." He then gave Nasser his own tar and instructed him to go on playing.

From then on, Nasser's joy was his music. His playing thrilled his audiences

Since childhood he'd been unable to meet the conventional expectations of others. His mother's, his brother's, his teachers', the parents of the woman he loved, his wife, his children.

His mother urged him to marry a woman he didn't love so that he would forget his loss. Although the woman he married did love him, she resented his music. His children, influenced by their mother's attitude, became estranged from him. This drove him further and further into his music.

After he failed to find another tar equal to his broken one, feeling that without that tar and his music there was nothing else he wanted, Nasser came to the conclusion, "To live, it's not enough to be alive." He decided to die.

This where the novel really begins. Through Satrapi's masterful construction, we are able to piece together what we need to understand who Nassar was, and why he would make this tragic choice.

Satrapi reveals Nasser's life and character by skillfully rearranging temporal events - picking up a incident, then dropping it, and then weaving it in later on in the story with new threads. She loops the past into the present, the future into the past. Sometimes, from frame to frame, she switches back and forth between the past and the present, showing how a character's unhappy memories and lingering hurt become emotional IEDs on the path to true understanding.

There are many lenses through which to "see" another person, many ways in which to know them. At Nassaer's mother's funeral, a mystic tells him the story of five men in the dark trying to describe a whole elephant from the part each has touched. "We give meaning to life based upon our point of view," he tells Nasser. In Chicken With Plums, through characters and events, Satrapi gives us the whole elephant.

As the novel progresses, Satrapi's drawings become more expressive and surreal, adding more decorative touches. Her work resembles animation, almost cartoonish, but her story has the depth of a great novel. She has the timing of a film maker, knowing just what to show when, and how to keep the mystery and tension to the end.

Chicken With Plums has touched me deeply. It's a heart breaking story of love on many levels, fulfilled and unfulfilled. I believe Nasser died of a broken heart. Without Irane and without his music, he could not find a way to be in this world.

I have read all of Marjane Satrapi's American releases, and I have been a fan since the first one, Persepolis. In Chicken with Plums, Satrapi tells the story of her uncle, Nasser Ali Khan, a musician overtaken by a sense of meaninglessness over the loss of his tar. Satrapi's straightforward, simple style quickly drew me into the story, which I read in a single sitting. Despite the simplicity of its approach, however, Chicken with Plums packs quite a punch. Like a Greek tragedy, it leaves you feeling stunned, full of joy and a little bitter. Her uncle's tragedy acquires meaning through her telling of it. Another successful effort on the part of Marjane Satrapi!