Customer Reviews

Chicken with Plums

5 star:		(16)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(3)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

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!

It's 1959, and Nasser Ali Khan, the greatest musician in Iran, has lost all he ever loved. Not his wife, he doesn't love her. Not his children, he doesn't care for them. It's his Tar, the instrument he's played all his life. Try as he might, he can't find another Tar just like it. Bouncing from store to store, city to city, he can't find a Tar that sounds like the one he loved all his life. Too make matters worse, he recognizes a woman he'd known years earlier, bringing back a flood of memories. When he realizes he'll never find a Tar like the one he lost, he lies down to die.
In the eight days leading up to his death, Nasser looks back on his youth, and the brother whom his mother favored. He revisits the time his "educated" brother joined the communists, causing their mother to lose everything. He remembers how he bailed his brother out of trouble, then moved away to study music. There he met a women he knew he wanted, but her father refused to agree to the marriage, citing Nasser's musician status as too low for his daughter. Now, all Nasser has is a wife he never loved, two children he neglects, and an instrument that's gone and can't be replaced.
For eight days, he lies in bed, visiting the things he once loved, lost, wanted, hated, and finaly comes to terms with what he always feared true; that his sacrifices in life were all in vain.

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.

This is more than one remove from Persepolis I and II (which I also loved) but well-told, well-drawn, and moving. Reminding me of Persian miniatures and medieval Persian romance, it tells the story of Nasser Ali Khan, a true musician, his love, and his death. There are also some fascinating asides into the lives of other family members. Having lived two years in Tehran, I loved it because it reminded me of the culture I loved. Ms. Satrapi's work never fails to move and surprise me; more, please!

I bought 'Chicken with Plums' because I really liked Satrapi's 'Persepolis'.

'Plums' is based on a fascinating (true) story of Satrapi's great-uncle, Nasser Ali, a famous Iranian musician, who takes to his bed after his musical instrument is destroyed by his wife. Eight days later, he is dead.

But 'Plums' adds little to this story. It plods laboriously and gets almost unbearably bad in the middle. There are plenty of flashbacks and glimpses into Ali's posthumous world. But Satrapi's attempts at capturing universal themes through one man's story don't succeed. Nasser Ali's story reads like his own.

This would be fine if the story was engaging, but it's not. There are moments where Satrapi's genius shines through (e.g. Ali's dreams of Sophia Loren) but they're rare. The knots in Nasser Ali's life don't move the reader because their rendering feels trite. There is also some surprisingly sloppy writing (Satrapi says that it was perhaps better that Ali didn't live to see the degeneracy of his future generations, "He would surely have contracted cancer, which by all accounts is a much slower and significantly more painful way to die.")

Satrapi succeeded with Persepolis because a personal story was intertwined with a nation's (Iran). Every detail was pregnant because the themes were so sweeping - the destiny of a country and its people, the threat to their way of life. In Plums, Satrapi struggles to draw on a canvas that large. The end result looks bare and uninspiring.

I look forward to seeing better work from Satrapi.

The author of the popular Persepolis returns with another gem to the genre. Satrapi uses her trademark black and white drawings to construct a tragic portrait of her great uncle, Nasser Ali Khan, a famous tar player (resembles a lute) who pined away after his wife destroyed his prized instrument in a fit of rage. Although the protagonist's story is not nearly as endearing as the one charted by Persepolis' spunky heroine, fans of Satrapi's earlier work will find themselves entertained nonetheless. Recommended for Ages 16-Up for Language and Some Nudity.

Having read Persepolis I and II, as well as Embroideries, I was excited to snatch up Chicken With Plums as well. And despite some of the negative reviews here (which almost dissauded me), I found this book one of Satrapi's most magical, perfect creations. It's quite different than the autobiographical, child-like Persepolis I, though readers of Persepolis II and Embroideries will recognize the general tone and style. That said, it's a work that takes you by surprise with its directness, honesty, and sheer invention.

The book follows the last eight days of Nasser Ali Khan's life, as he decides to resign himself to death after his wife, in an argument, destroys his precious "tar"--an Iranian sitar-like instrument. He is a master musician, renowned throughout the country, and the great love affair of his life (despite one thwarted human one) was with this reciprocating instrument. Unable to find another tar to requite his passion, he loses all taste for life and its joys, and decides to stay in bed until Azrael, the Angel of Death, comes for his soul. While waiting, we get a series of flashbacks and flashforwards as he--and others--recount the stories and anecdotes that frame his life. Reading this book is like listening in on family stories around the dinner table, which by their very nature are fragmentary, interrputed, and from multiple points of view.

Though a simple story, the manner of telling it is amazingly complex and mesmerizing. Satrapi's storytelling is at its most concise here, but so much is revealed about the very human passions that shape a life, and how blind we are even to the people we live with. This is a magical book, filled with Satrapi's beautiful characterizations of the people she knew and loved. I cannot recommend this book highly enough.

"Chicken with Plums" is based on the true story of Satrapi's great-uncle, Nasser Ali, a famous Iranian musician, whose Tar is destroyed by his wife. After deciding that he has nothing else to live for he takes to his bed and waits to die. Eight days later he dies. In between Nasser's wife, brother, sister, and children all try to convince him to stay in the living world as he dreams of what the future might be.

"Chickens with Plums" has the same great artwork of Persepolis that places the focus on the characters faces instead of the background, but the story is ultimately lacking. Satrapi appears to be trying to show us some of the universal themes of live, love, and everything in between and uses her great-uncle's story as a way to demonstrate that. But the story instead portrays her uncle as a shallow, vain man and its difficult to sympathize or relate to him in any way.

I think I understand what Satrapi's is trying to say with this book, but it just doesn't work. In the meantime I'll treasure Persepolis and I'll wait for another book that shows off Satrapi's brilliance.