Sunday, January 13, 2008

Books I've Bought, Books I've Read Over the Winter Break

Books Bought:
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift
Haunted Tales, Edward Gorey
Paradise, Toni Morrison
The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino
The Penal Colony, Franz Kafka
Garage Band, Gipi
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

Books Read:
Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, J.K. Rowling
The Road, Cormac McCarthy
All the Pretty Horses, Cormac McCarthy
Motherless Brooklyn, Jonathan Lethem
Haunted Tales, Edward Gorey (ed.)
The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino
Garage Band, Gipi
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi

Well,  I started off with a lot of steam, reading the Harry Potter and the McCarthy books in a few days.  They were great, all three.  I knew somewhat what to expect with the McCarthy, but it still didn't prepare me for the grisly spectre of the dead, which is exposed to the reader as though through the dark, rusting mouth of a pistol.  I went home to Kentucky over the break to spend some time with the family, where I witnessed a new kind of excessive decorations that make inflatable Santa Homers look lame. 
I was unsure what to do with some xmas gift money at the "local" Barnes & Nobles, so, at a good friend's suggestion, I decided to venture into the graphic novel.  It is an of intimidating field to me, like classical music or constructivism, but I had the good fortune of getting a suggestion by a very helpful store employee who was also a graphic novelist.  Realizing I wasn't as interested in the choppy and colorful Sea of Manga, he recommended a book by Gipi, and a book by Marjane Satrapi, neither of which I had heard of before.  The Gipi book was beautiful, and managed to evoke bursting color in the setting of a run-down surburb somewhere in Eastern Europe.  His organization of the book into four parts was very clever, as though each chapter were a song on an EP. 
Persepolis was nearly the opposite, all black and white simplicity, not like the fantastically misty magic atmosphere of the movie, but I ended up really liking it that way.  The simplicity emphasizes the playful that imbues the narrator, and ultimately plays a huge role in the resistance the narrator mounts against the socio-ideological regime of Iran she is forced to confront, where playfulness and humor and art are viewed as decadent and Westernized. Satrapi chronicles a life that is hard to imagine for me, and yet I felt throughout the novel as though I could understand her, as if through these cartoons I was inducted into the hushed-up world of Iran's sexual intrigue, gossip, and friendship that only make the Iranian religious regime seem all the more ridiculous, and reminded me how subversive art and the freedom  to express sexuality can be.  

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