Nylon Road: A Graphic Memoir of Coming of Age in Iran [Paperback]

Parsua Bashi (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 10, 2009

In the tradition of graphic memoirs such as Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis, comes the story of a young Iranian woman’s struggles with growing up under Shiite Law, her journey into adulthood, and the daughter whom she had to leave behind when she left Iran. NYLON ROAD is a window into the soul of a culture that we are still struggling to understand.  Beautifully told, poignant, this is a powerful work about the necessity of freedom.    

Editorial Reviews

From Booklist

Multitalented artist and feminist Bashi offers up a memoir that complements, without imitating, Marjane Satrapi’s Persepolis (2003). She and Satrapi have a few significant details in common. Both were youths during the Iranian Revolution, both eventually traveled west to live in Switzerland, and both chose to tell their stories and opinions in graphic novels. Bashi, however, doesn’t just tell her story to readers unknown. She organizes her story for herself, or the selves she has been at different ages, with different information and in different cultural contexts. Each brief chapter shows her being “visited” by a past self—the idealist teen, the abused and religious young wife, the brokenhearted mother, the new immigrant, and so forth—who argues against her present choices. This is broader than a coming-of-age memoir, following into early middle age Bashi’s development of her art and her politics as well as her sense of self. The art is flat and cartoony and provides a wealth of detail about emotions as well as culturally specific settings. --Francisca Goldsmith

Review

Advance Praise for Nylon Road:

“NYLON ROAD is an engaging and entertaining journey into Islamic Iranian culture through the eyes of young professional woman. It is a window into the transformation of Iran from a pro-western country into the abyss of Islamic totalitarianism. The writer brilliantly takes you into her life and shows you how that affected her life and makes the case for the importance of democracy and freedom.” - Brigitte Gabriel, New York Times Bestselling author of They Must Be Stopped

"Parsua Bashi is one of those compelling voices who rarely get heard in the mass media, but who can sing her poignant song loud and clear through the intimate medium of the graphic novel."

- Paul Gravett, author of Holy Sh*t! and the bestselling author Manga

“Parsua Bashi weaves personal experience with Iranian history and, without coming

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 128 pages
• Publisher: St. Martin's Griffin; Original edition (November 10, 2009)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0312532865
• ISBN-13: 978-0312532864
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.1 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 11.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (2 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #978,033 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Thoughtful and perceptive, November 26, 2009

By 

Robert Elgie (Ajax, Ontario Canada) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Nylon Road: A Graphic Memoir of Coming of Age in Iran (Paperback)

The gold standard of graphic memoirs for me is Alison Bechdel's Fun Home: A Family Tragicomic. Measured against that book, Parsua Bashi's Nylon Road comes out a good, solid, sterling silver.

A more obvious comparison would be with Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis: The Story of a Childhood, but that's one I can't really make since I put Persepolis down part way through. Satrapi's drawing style was one of the chief reasons for that: I found it blocky and unattractive. Bashi's fluid and varied panels are more to my taste.

In her examination of coming of age in Iran, Bashi succeeds well in conveying the conflicting loyalties that have made the move from her childhood in pre-revolutionary Iran and her adolescence in the Khomeini era through to her adulthood in the West so challenging. On the whole, few of her experiences are ones we would want to share.

The migration story is the immediate focus of Bashi's book. But the glass through which we view a Muslim Iranian woman's journey to greater personal freedom becomes also a mirror in which we are encouraged to take a hard, appraising look at our own culture. It's easy, as we see the daily news clips from the Middle East and Muslim Asia, to become a bit smug about our freedom of expression, our comparative progress at gender equality, our relative openness to multiculturalism, and the stability of our civil societies. These achievements, however, have come at some cost. For me, the real reason to take a good look at Nylon Road is Bashi's invitation to do some serious self-examination of our own.

1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Marjane Satrapi's Persepolis, step aside..., November 13, 2009

By 

Mary J "MjB" (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Nylon Road: A Graphic Memoir of Coming of Age in Iran (Paperback)

Anyone interested in graphic novels (like Persepolis), comic strips (TinTin or Astrix), the ban dessinée genre (Art Spiegelman's Mouse) and the country Iran is going to LOVE Parsua Bashi's exquisitely illustrated "Nylon Road." Bashi is brutally honest about her life as a young woman in Iran who comes from a political family, her adolescence, her marriage, her divorce and a bitter custody battle in which she loses her only child, a daughter to her ex-husband (due to Iran's patriarchal legal system). Her story is rich, funny, tragic and entertaining, all at once...Her story also deals with pre and post-revolutionary Iranian history and Bashi's struggle to adapt to life in Switzerland as an exiled Iranian--a country she moves to in 2004 after falling in love with a Swiss man! Nylon Road is 10 times better than Starapi's Persepolis (another book I adore)!