I'm a UK-based editor for a major publisher. I'm making it my off-duty duty to experience FIVE books, FIVE films, art, TV, music and food from every country in the world (where feasible). See drop down menus for my progress.
The art world remains hugely Eurocentric, and even living in London it can be really tricky to find shows of work by artists and photographers from outside Europe.
The wonderful, slightly eccentric Horniman Museum in south London is currently hosting a small exhibition of work by Nigerian photographer Jide Odukoya. Based in Lagos, he is a street and documentary photographer, challenging the poverty porn of Western photographers by showcasing the glamour and flamboyance of traditional Nigerian wedding ceremonies.
Nevertheless, ‘Turn it Up: On Paradoxes’ also makes clear the dissonance between the opulent wedding celebrations and the everyday poverty that is a part of Lagos life for many.
“Carriage” (2019):
The Horniman reminds us that the phrase “Turn it Up” is “modern vernacular for lavish fun”. Many of these photographs are joyful, and full of family pride, happiness and intimacy. Safe to say, Odukoya is a few times more talented than the photographer who took the photos at my own wedding!
However, the photo series also shines a spotlight on the global reach of a tendency towards rampant, aspirational consumerism, as popularised by celebrity culture, which has come to characterise 21st century life in many places.
Entry to the exhibition is free, and there’s plenty of other stuff to see at the museum, including its iconic overstuffed walrus.
This is no doubt a bit of a niche French film, focusing as it does on publishing insiders wrangling with the reinvention of the industry for the 21st century; it was originally intended to be released with the dire title E-book. I, inexplicably to most, find this kind of subject area quite appealing, having worked for countless years in a publishing industry that has been readjusting painfully to the introduction of digital products, e-books and the usurping power of the internet.
I found the movie comically, stereotypically French, containing as it does bed-hopping, gratuitous tit shots, bad jokes and plenty of pseudy pseudo-intellectualising. Everyone is shagging someone else’s partner, of course.
The characters say things like “tweets are a modern day haiku” and “people say art is corrupt, thus worthless, so it should be free”. Unfortunately, the endless arguments about the inevitable death of books, the rise of e-readers and the redundancy of libraries (noooo!) felt rather old, since they’ve been dragging on for decades.
Juliette Binoche was great, because she’s Juliette Binoche (I particularly love her for her cameo in the excellent French comedy drama series Call My Agent/Dix Pour Cent). Other key roles are played by Vincent Macaigne, as scruffy writer Leonard, who turns out barely fictionalised accounts of his love life, and Guillaume Canet as Binoche’s husband, suave publisher Alain. (I was interested to learn that Canet is not only an actor, but a real-life showjumper too, which seems unnecessarily impressive and bit Rupert Campbell-Black.)
This film won’t be everybody’s cup of café, but it kept me entertained for an evening. The jokes weren’t funny though.
When it came to choosing a female South Korean writer, there was really no choice to be made. Han Kang is a previous winner of the Man Booker International Prize, and two of her novels recently made it onto the top 5 of a list of the best 100 works by female writers in translation.
Despite these plaudits, I didn’t enjoy Human Acts. It’s not the sort of book that’s designed to be enjoyed, though it is, I think, important. It uses fiction to take an unflinching look at the events of, and fall out from, the violent suppression of the Gwangju uprising in 1980 (about which I till now knew nothing). The recounting of the horrific events of that time, the slaughter of innocents, the torture, is relentless. It challenges us to look away, and I really, really wanted to look away and never pick up the book again.
At the heart of the book is the life and death of a young boy, Dong-Ho.
“Looking at that boy’s life … what is this thing we call a soul? Just some non-existent idea? Or something that might as well not exist? Or no, is it like a kind of glass? Glass is transparent, right? And fragile. That’s the fundamental nature of glass. And that’s why objects that are made of glass have to be handled with care. After all, if they end up smashed or cracked or chipped then they’re good for nothing, right, you just have to chuck them away.
Before, we used to have a kind of glass that couldn’t be broken. A truth so hard and clear it might as well have been made of glass. So when you think about it, it was only when we were shattered that we proved we had souls. That what we really were was humans made of glass.”
I sympathise hugely with the plight of the real-life victims of the Gwangju uprising, and the families that they left behind.
However, I found that the novel’s laboured, circuitous prose created a distance between the reader and the characters, and so the read was strangely emotionless. Perhaps the characters are supposed to stand, at times, for the collective experience and the collective suffering, but for me it didn’t quite work.
I’ve read other books with very difficult subject matter, and found them less difficult to read, but with this novel I felt like I was wading through a thick, viscous liquid for days. It’s a short book (just over 200 pages), but I could only face 10 pages or so at a time.
Having just reading about Margaret Atwood’s well-realised fictional dystopia Gilead in The Testaments, it was sobering to recognise echoes of that novel in the accounts here of terrible, real events of 1980 in Gwangju: the indiscriminate deaths, the requisition of public spaces for bodies and prisoners, the clandestine, damning record-keeping.
Human Acts is worthy and polemical, the sort of book a prize committee couldn’t not give an award to, but it’s a punishing read.
Unexpectedly, it was in the very personal Epilogue to the book that the characters and events of the novel finally seemed fully realised. We learn that Han Kang was born in Gwangju and haunted by the violence there. As an adult, she made contact with the family of the school boy Dong-Ho, upon whom the character in the book is based, who lost his life there in 1980. The book seeks to pay tribute to his life and death – and to the lives and death of all those others who were murdered in the Gwangju uprising – while examining the nature of violence and brutality.
I won’t be racing off to read more writing by Han Kang, but I’m pleased to have become acquainted with her work.
I googled Togolese writers, and the first name to pop up was that of Tété-Michel Kpomassie. The intriguing title of this book, published in 1981, meant it just begged to be picked up. Togo and Greenland seem opposite extremes, but author Tété-Michel Kpomassie was determined to make the journey to Greenland from his home in Togo after seeing a book about the frozen territory. He set off as a teenager in 1959, just before he was to be indoctrinated into a snake cult.
Perhaps now is a good time to admit that as a small child I was obsessed with huskies. I would attach my stuffed Highland Terrier toy to a length of wool and hold his reins in my hands as I perched in an armchair, willing him to whizz across the carpet, while I yelled “Mush! Mush!” The point of this anecdote being, I guess, that I can understand the fascination that the teenage Kpomassie felt for the lives of the people who used to be known as Eskimos (now more accurately known as Inuit).
Kpomassie made his way slowly north, over several years, educating himself via correspondence course, and taking short-term jobs. Kpomassie’s optimism, exuberance and charisma jump off the page, and it is striking how people everywhere proved themselves willing to put him up in their homes after a moment’s acquaintance.
Greenland is massive, stretching 2.166 million km², but is currently home to only around 56,000 people. On his arrival, Kpomassie became something of a local celebrity, being welcomed into the various communities among which he stayed (and into the beds of several women!). He travelled north through the territory, experiencing brutal living conditions, in what became a sort of ethnographic study.
Still gripping the two uprights, my companion brought the sled to a graceful halt beside me, while I wobbled to my feet and dusted snow from my clothes. He didn’t even ask if I was hurt.
“Unbelievable!” he exclaimed. “How can a man fall off a sled? It’s not possible, yet you, you managed to do it. I saw you rolling down like a seal’s bladder, and I couldn’t believe my eyes!”
Kpomassie demonstrated a preternatural ability to pick up languages, seeming to converse with ease wherever he went, and relays many colourful, sometimes funny, adventures, as well as a few genuinely disturbing encounters.
The locals’ diet sounds truly disgusting, as they survived on seal blubber and, in places, raw dog meat, while Kpomassie had warm clothing stitched for him out of dog fur and seal skin. (I don’t whether these traditions have persisted into the 21st century, or to what extent climate change has affected current ways of life.)
Raw fish exposed to glacial air is firm, even hard, and doesn’t smell. It is wholesome and pleasant to eat, even when crunchy with ice crystals. However, I would never eat raw fish in my own country, for in the hot climate it goes soft and limp and start to smell within two hours … As for seal blubber, that native delicacy, is is simply nauseating for a foreigner and resembles tallow. Lightly dried and yellowed by the sun, then “hung” as the Greenlanders like it, it smells rancid. And when frozen, frankly it even tastes like candle wax.
The film rights to Kpomassie’s engaging and enlightening adventures were bought some time ago. Development work commenced on a film adaptation of the memoir, but it seems that work must have slowed or stalled – though I did come across this teaser trailer from 2016:
The short novel Love (Kjærlighet) was published in Norway in 1997, but only appeared in English translation in 2018, when it was published by the marvellous Archipelago Press. Martin Aitken won the 2019 PEN American translation prize for his work on the book, which has been voted as the 6th best book to be published in Norway.
To my knowledge, this is only the second Norwegian book I’ve ever read, so I’m not in a position to judge whether it deserves that 6th place, but Hanne Ørstavik’s Love is very cleverly and tightly plotted, and a pretty compulsive read.
The book focuses on one evening in the the lives of a single mother, Vibeke, and her young son, Jon, on the day before Jon’s 9th birthday. They have recently moved to a small, rural town, where Vibeke has taken the role of arts and culture officer. The reader is pulled inside their consciousnesses from the start, and enmeshed in their thoughts.
Jon, a bit neglected, a bit lonely, longs for a toy train set for his birthday, complete with snow plough. He imagines his mother may have picked up on his hints, and dreams of the cake she will prepare for him. However, their pre-occupations are running on entirely different tracks.
Vibeke is a fantasist, vain, longing for romance, and obsessed with external appearances, whether they be physical looks or domestic interiors. She reads fanatically, as a form of escapism, wishing away her son, so that she can focus on her books:
“She gets through three books a week, often four or five. She wishes she could read all the time, sitting in bed with the duvet pulled up, with coffee, lots of cigarettes, and a warm nightdress on. She could have done without the TV too. I never watch it, she tells herself, but Jon would have minded.”
It is rapidly evident that Vibeke is a pretty terrible mother, due to her self-absorption. (I’m fairly certain that I’m a much better one, but I could relate to her longing for more reading time!)
Vibeke daydreams about a brown-eyed colleague at work, maybe he likes her?
“In the Q & A session he made a comment about being interested in extending interdepartmental collaborations”.
Dream sequences underline the fact that neither Jon nor Vibeke has their expectations grounded in reality.
From the second chapter, tension begins to build. Jon sets out after dark to sell raffle tickets, entering the home of an old man, who leads him down to a dark cellar, where we expect the worst is about to happen.
“At the bottom they go through a little passage, a mat of artificial grass covering the floor. The place smells rank and strange. Jon thinks it smells of soil. The man stops at a door at the end. He turns towards Jon, his hand on the handle.”
But, as we’re used to seeing in a film, the next paragraph cuts back to Vibeke, leaving the reader briefly disorientated:
“She takes off her clothes while she runs her bath. There’s no bubble bath left in the bottle. She takes a cotton bud from a box on the shelf and removes her nail polish with some remover…”
On this occasion the tension is resolved, harmlessly. The novel is full of such moments, as the narrative switches rapidly from one perspective to the other. With its sense of impending menace and horrible inevitability the book reminded me of Samanta Schweblin’s Fever Dream, another disarming, slim book. Every encounter is loaded with dread, through the knowing use of familiar tropes.
The outside world, the snow, the ice, the drifts, are all beautifully evoked, although the text is not poetic. Instead, it is stark, open and to the point. The novella concludes like one of Hans Christan Andersen’s darker fairy tales. Love is a strange, ironic title for a book that serves to highlight the ways in which we may so completely fail to understand or fully acknowledge those that are closest and most precious to us.
Directed and co-written by Gustav Möller. Released October 2018.
EUROPE
I spotted this Danish thriller on Netflix UK, and settled down with a cuppa to watch, demanding that the husband pause progress on his ongoing Breaking Bad-marathon. I wasn’t sure whether this film was particularly representative of Danish film, and I still don’t really know the answer to that, but Lars von Trier it is not. Thankfully.
The set of this film is probably one of the most pared back that I’ve ever encountered. All we see is the interior of a two-room office. Throughout the bulk of the movie the viewer watches a deskbound policeman, Asger Holm (played by Jakob Cedergren), process the equivalent of 999 distress calls from members of the public.
So far so boring huh? Except this film is edge of the seat thrilling.
That the film manages to hold us in its thrall for 85 minutes without showing us anything beyond Asger’s office, his desk, his computer screen and his phone, is testament to its power. It excels at building up suspense and tension, in concert with clever use of sound and lighting.
We know nothing about the policeman beyond the fact that he seems not to be someone who is normally stuck at a desk fielding calls. He is uncomfortable and tense from the start, before he has any obvious cause to be. He takes a few routine calls: a drug-addled member of the public, a minor mishap. Then a woman’s frightened voice comes on the line. She is captive in a vehicle.
From that point on twists and turns abound as Asgard tries to do the right thing, refusing to go home at the end of his shift, refusing to simply hand over to another team and hope for the best. Meanwhile, there are hints that something has gone wrong in his career already.
The film was selected as the Danish entry for Best Foreign Language Film at the 91st Academy Awards, and it was one of the shortlisted films, eventually losing out to Mexican film Roma.
If you’re having a Netflix and chill kind of evening you could make a worse choice than to watch this film. Though you might be so engrossed that you forget to chill – in any sense of the word!
It’s probably safe to say that the appearance of The Testaments has been the publishing event of 2019 in the UK, the USA and Canada. Here in London the launch in September garnered huge publicity, with branches of Waterstones bookshop remaining open so that Atwood super-fans could grab themselves a copy at midnight on 10 September.
Perhaps the excitement was sparked by the success of the television adaptation, starring Elizabeth Moss. I had watched the first season (based on The Handmaid’s Tale), but not the second (which diverges from that story), so I didn’t have a problem in adjusting expectations slanted one way or another by the TV series in another direction when reading The Testaments, which is not based on events in the televised drama (reminiscent of the situation that surrounded the most recent Bridget Jones book and movie).
A good friend was heavily involved in the production process for The Testaments, so I was pleased to learn of Margaret Atwood’s UK Booker Prize win in October (a win that was shared equally with Bernardine Evaristo, for her Girl, Woman, Other). Nevertheless, the decision to split the prize has attracted controversy, especially given Atwood’s acknowledgement that she doesn’t much need the publicity, with the book selling 250,000 copies across all formats within a couple of weeks.
I hadn’t read the Booker shortlist in full. The only other two books I’d managed to get to were Salman Rushdie’s Quichotte and Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes, 38 Seconds in this Strange World, neither of which matches, for me, the pull of The Testaments.
The Testaments‘ main plus is that it is wildly readable, much more so, strangely, than its predecessor, The Handmaid’s Tale (published in 1985), which drags in places. And it is terrifying in both the extent of the world imagined by Atwood, and in the hideous plausibility of that world. Known as Gilead, it is an extreme form of puritan theocracy, stretching across swathes of the former USA.
I really enjoyed the book, which even accompanied me to the hospital accident and emergency department when my 12-year-old daughter injured her leg (she coincidentally was also deep into her own dystopian read – the omnipresent Hunger Games).
Set some 15 years after the events of The Handmaid’s Tale, The Testaments is an engrossing piece of storytelling, with some interesting juxtapositions: there are moments of culture shock, as a character enters Gilead from modern-day Canada, and is non-plussed at the bizarre and strangely medieval practices that are the norm in the patriarchal state, where women are uncompromisingly repressed and oppressed.
We get a wider perspective than was the case with The Handmaid’s Tale, with testimony from the terrifying Aunt Lydia on the foundation and operation of Gilead, even if her mode of delivery, a secret written testimony, is sometimes implausible and a bit clunky:
“This morning I got up an hour early to steal a few moments before breakfast with you, my reader. You’ve become somewhat of an obsession – my sole confidant, my only friend – for to whom can I tell the truth besides you? Who else can I trust?”
The book is also something of a coming of age novel (I think it’s time for me to step away from the coming of age novels, as I seem to have read a glut of them recently). It focuses on events in the lives of a small number of teenage girls, who represent the first generation to have been brought up in Gilead, where women are limited to a small number of roles: high-status Wives, low-status Econowives, fertile Handmaidens to produce children for the often infertile Wives, Pearl Girl missionaries and autocratic, celibate Aunts.
In the final third of the book all the threads begin to come together, and a bit of humour creeps into the narrative, as well as real jeopardy. Plot-driven, it reads at times like a mash-up between Philip Pullman’s La Belle Sauvage and a US buddy movie.
I liked Atwood’s quietly profound, snappy phrases (“Nobody is any authority on the fucks other people give”) and clever little details, like the discovery that Aunts are named for reassuringly familiar (to the older generation, at least), female-orientated, defunct commercial products: Aunt Maybelline, Aunt Estée, Aunt Dove.
I’ll forgive The Testaments for a few startling coincidences, which serve to keep the action moving. I particularly liked the nods to modern political phenomena, such as references to those in authority resorting to accusations of ‘fake news’ to defend themselves. Hmm, sounds strangely familiar.
The book’s acknowledgements section comes with the reminder that nothing takes place in the novel that is unheard of in human history, shaking up our “it could never happen here” complacency. Let’s face it, modern life sometimes doesn’t feel that far from dystopia…
This new release (2019), directed and co-written by Alejandro Landes, is like Lord of the Flies on shrooms.
Monos is an exciting, visceral and disturbing film, which has been selected by Colombia as its entry for the upcoming Oscars in the category of International Feature Film. In October 2019 the film also won the prize for best film at the official competition of the 2019 British Film Institute (BFI) London Film Festival.
Eight tooled-up teens linked to the shady ‘Organization’ camp out in filth on a misty, rainy South American mountain top, keeping tabs on an American hostage known only as Doctora, and supplied with milk from a conscripted black and white cow called Shakira.
Subjected to a tough, intermittent training regime under the mysterious, diminutive and hard-bodied ‘Messenger’, when they kick back, they really kick back. The 15th birthday of one teen (with the nom de guerre Rambo) is celebrated with a ritual beating. This is followed, when darkness falls, by hedonistic, tribal scenes, reminiscent of a 90s squat rave, which at times took me right back to a typical night out circa 1998; even the cow has glow sticks. After Shakira is accidentally shot dead, however, events, already undercut with danger, take an increasingly darker turn.
The film is elemental, with scenes of the child soldiers looking down from their mountain top onto expansive, gorgeous, endlessly cloud-filled skies, and miles of rain forest. The soundtrack by Mica Levi is haunting, evoking the fluting whistles of birds, and at times a sort of innocence and at others, menace. The cinematography is often beautiful, and the film builds a claustrophobic sense of threat, laced with sweat, bugs and humidity.
There is minimal dialogue, which works to build up the feeling of disconnection and dread. The action takes place at an undefined time (there is no evidence of mobile phones or computers), so it could just as easily be now or 50 years ago. We never get the teenagers’ back story, and we know very little about the organization of which they form a part (presumably at least tangentially based on the Colombian guerrilla movement FARC), but we do witness rare moments of vulnerability and brokenness, as events spiral. I watched the film subtitled in English, and the Spanish-speaking performances are electrifying, with little-known actors working alongside well-known figures from US movies and TV series, such as Moisés Arias, a former star of Hannah Montana.
The film is definitely worth catching on the big screen if you can, as its power would undoubtedly be weakened if watched in other formats.
I serendipitously found my copy of this book in a secondhand bookshop in Herne Hill, South London, which I’ve found to be an unexpected and excitingly ripe source of obscure works of fiction in translation. The husband – amusingly but perhaps a bit meanly – suggested that maybe someone local is doing the exact same project as me, but is just that little bit ahead…
Our Lady of the Nile by Scholastique Mukasonga rattles along like a Rwandan version of Mallory Towers – until, suddenly, it is chillingly nothing at all like an Enid Blyton boarding school novel. Set in 1979, it follows the school lives of a group of elite Rwandan girls. They attend a prestigious Catholic boarding school, the Notre-Dame du Nil, which is run by nuns.
The opening lines of the book paint a vivid and captivating picture of the institution:
‘There is no better lycée than Our Lady of the Nile. Nor is there any higher. Twenty-five hundred meters, the white teachers proudly proclaim …. “We’re so close to heaven,” whispers Mother Superior, clasping her hands together.
‘The school year coincides with the rainy season, so the lycee is often wrapped in clouds. Sometimes, not often, the sun peeks through and you can see as far as the big lake, that shiny blue puddle down in the valley.’
In the anecdotes about school life – both recognisable to myself as a Brit and not so recognisable – a vibrant picture of the girls lives is built up. The pupils comprise predominantly Hutu girls and a few Tutsi girls attending the school to fulfil a ‘quota’, and as the story unfurls it serves as a microcosm of wider Rwandan society.
As one of the reviews on the book’s back jacket says, “Strangely, it is in this incredibly light novel, that one best understands the ethnic, political, and religious reasons behind the massacre of the mysterious Tutsis.”
I’d never taken the time to fill in how and why the Rwandan genocide took place. And I’m ashamed to say I’d never truly taken in the sheer scale of the atrocities. While reading the novel, I was driven to do some research online to fill in some of my missing Rwandan history.
I learnt that the Tutsis have sometimes been described as “African Jews”, and that perceived differences and societal divisions between the majority Hutu and minority Tutsi populations were reinforced by Rwanda’s Belgian occupiers. Influenced by the European eugenics movement, the Belgian colonisers favoured the Tutsi population, considering their lighter skin to indicate Caucasian heritage. As a consequence, Tutsis were often rewarded with political clout and senior positions in the colonial regime.
Anti-colonial and anti-Tutsi movements began to emerge. Rwanda was declared a republic in 1961, and the monarchy was abolished. Independence from Belgium followed in 1962. In April 1994 the highly symbolic murder of Tutsi Queen Gicanda (who had been living “locked up in her Butare villa” for years) took place towards the beginning of what later became known as the Rwandan genocide. The novel is set almost equidistant in time from these key events, and deep ethnic tensions are evident even in the rarefied atmosphere of the lycée.
Mukasonga’s novel was first published in 2012, and appeared in English translation in 2014. It won the Prix Renaudot in 2012. The copy I read is published by US publisher Archipelago books, which describes itself as a “not-for-profit press devoted to publishing excellent translations of classic and contemporary world literature.” Recently having been voted one of the 100 best books by women in translation, Our Lady of the Nile is a book I’m glad to have chosen to represent a work by a Rwandan female writer.
Translated from the French by Mattias Ripa (Satrapi’s real life husband) and Anjali Singh
Marjane Satrapi’s memoir Persepolis broke new ground, by exploring her experiences during and after the Iranian Islamic Revolution and the Iran-Iraq war of the late 1970s and 1980s, in the form of a graphic novel. Published in the early 2000s, by 2018 it had sold more than 2 million copies.
As Satrapi writes in an Introduction to the book: “Since [the Islamic Revolution] this old and great civilization has been discussed mostly in connection with fundamentalism, fanaticism, and terrorism. As an Iranian who has lived more than half of my life in Iran, I know that this image is far from the truth.”
I ordered my copy from my local Southwark library. Really, it is two books, or even four books, as it includes what was originally published in France as Persepolis I and II (The Story of a Childhood) and Persepolis III and IV (The Story of a Return). I’d taken it out of the library before, but hadn’t got round to reading it, assuming, I guess, that because of its themes it would be heavy-going and hard work. However, once I’d decided I was going to embark on my global cultural tour, I grabbed a copy for the second time – and actually read it. Within just a few pages I was gripped….
….Although my only gripe was that the text is teeny tiny, even with my old-person reading glasses on.
The book is aimed squarely at a Western audience, and is designed to break down stereotypes and challenge misinformation, as well as entertain. Unsurprisingly, the book was banned in Iran. Satrapi herself settled in France in her 20s, although her enduring love for her native country shines out clearly from her writing.
Although I’m not usually a fan of the comic strip format, the device makes the sometimes challenging themes of Satrapi’s story hugely accessible. Satrapi is feisty and funny, describing her experiences of growing up, which veer between the universal and the specific.
Satrapi describes how as a small child her ambition in life was to become a prophet. She believed that she was visited by God, although his pronouncements could be prosaic: “Tomorrow the weather is going to be nice. It will be 75 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade.”
The illustrations, an integral component of the book, are great: evocative and, again, often disarmingly funny. Satrapi is brilliant on facial expressions. Black and white, stark and combining elements of both her Iranian and her adopted cultures, they effectively illuminate Satrapi’s experiences.
Satrapi’s experience in Iran, of course, was in many ways atypical. Her family were part of an educated elite, and had the money to send her to Europe for several years in her teens, to take trips to Europe and Canada themselves, and to pay for Satrapi to move to France to study in her twenties.
So she had a comparatively privileged lifestyle, but that is not to undermine or understate the difficulties Satrapi faced growing up during a time of repression and devastating conflict. And she effectively conveys the horrific toll it took on the people of Iran as a whole. This includes the sudden proliferation of nuptial chambers (as Satrapi explains, when an unmarried shi’ite man dies, a nuptial chamber is built for him so the dead man can, symbolically at least, gain carnal knowledge) and the huge number of streets renamed in honour of fallen ‘martyrs’.
In addition to being a coming of age story and a political memoir, the book is also a tale of familial love. Satrapi’s warm, loving, secular parents were endlessly supportive and caring, and her filthy-mouthed granny is an appealing character (who, incidentally, attributed the pertness of her elderly breasts to a daily 10-minute dip in ice water). Illuminating and entertaining, and a quick read, I wholly recommend this illuminating book.
Imogen is Reading and Watching the World: On Books, Film, Art & More 