Customer Rating: 
Summary: Seeing the Elephant
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating: 
Summary: A Beautiful Book
Comment: People who have been critical of this story seem to be missing the story's heart. Chicken with Plums
is enigmatic. The character doesn't understand himself and since this is a story passed to her, she
doesn't make things up. It is a very pragmatic way to tell a story.
Its a mystery of
sorts, different than Persepolis because in that stoy's case she had all the keys at hand and even
then Persepolis isn't deeper only more voluminous. It seems to me the nature of her stories to allow
for the character to be at a loss and also the reader. She seems to be saying, here are the clues,
pick through them, draw your own conclusions.
She seems to be inviting us to
unknowing, wondering. It's a beautiful book where she only tells you what she knows and if you are
the kind, and there is nothing wrong with this, who likes all the answers at the end than this is
not the book for you. It is book for walking and thinking about, it is a daydreamers book, an
agnostics book.
Customer Rating: Summary: Comically sad and far too short . . .
Comment: 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.
