Give graphics a go

I love graphic novels and it drives me crazy when people adopt a sniffy “aren’t they just comics with a fancy name?” attitude to them. It’s always seemed a harder ask to come up with words and pictures than just one or the other and narrow-minded readers who won’t try them are missing out on so much.

The work of Marjane Satrapi provides an unthreatening introduction to the pleasures of words and pictures put together; Persepolis and Persepolis 2, her memoirs of growing up in Iran and Europe, would be fine pieces of work if they were ‘only’ novels but her deceptively simple drawings add a whole new dimension to her stories.

Embroideries is a sparkling take on secret women’s business, as Satrapi retells the stories she heard from her female relatives as they gathered for tea at her grandmother’s house.

Some are funny, some are sad, some are outrageous. They are all utterly believable and apart from the exotic location and the very unWestern frankness they could have just as well been overheard in Temuka rather than Teheran.

Chicken with plums is the poignant story of Satrapi’s great-uncle, who was one of Iran’s most honoured musicians before deciding he could not go on living after his wife destroyed his tar (an Iranian lute).

He took to his bed, dying eight days later, and the book takes us through those eight days one by one as the musician is visited by his family and by his own dreams and visions as he waits for death.

Again the fact that it is a graphic novel makes it more complete; as The New Yorker said “Satrapi’s deceptively simple, remarkably powerful drawings match the precise but flexible prose she employs”.