TBR: Embroideries
Yes, I caught the boys’ bug. Ugh. I’m about 80% better, at the stage where I’m starting to be hungry, but still nervous about eating real food.
Today’s book is Embroideries, by Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis. Imagine the women from Reading L.lita In Tehran, drinking tea and discussing sex — the advantages of being a mistress over being a wife, nose jobs, arranged v. love marriages, faking virginity. It’s a short book, maybe 150 pages, with only a few sentences on each page, so it’s a quick read. It mostly succeeds because Western readers don’t think of Iranian women as having conversations that sound like something out of Sex and the City. And then it catches you again because just when you’ve accepted that their lives aren’t that different from ours, Satrapi changes gears and throws in a casual references to "embroideries" or re-virginization surgery.
Satrapi’s books are generally classified as graphic novels, but I think they’re really closer to picture books — the images illustrate the story, but don’t advance it. And I think she’s cheating a bit by dressing all the characters in black, even though the story appears to be set before the Revolution in Iran. (One of the most memorable images of Persepolis is when all of Marji’s classmates are suddenly dressed identically.) For a book about women, ironically, the picture from this book that resonates the most for me is the look of perplexity on Marji’s grandfather’s face when he comes out from his room and her grandmother shoos him away.
