Chicken with Plums Issue #29

By Ling Ma
Published: September 1st, 2006 | 12:00am

Unable to find the exact replacement of his beloved broken instrument, tar player Nasser Ali Khan simply climbs into bed one day, resolving to abstain from all life’s pleasures. Marjane Satrapi’s third U.S.-published graphic novel, based on the final days of her great uncle’s life in Iran during 1958, is segmented into each of the passing days Nasser remains bedridden, inching closer and closer to death. Throughout the brief interim, friends and relatives visit to cajole him out of his malaise, then eventually to say their goodbyes. Their bedside discourses with Nasser release a plethora of memories and visions that gradually unveil the intricacy of his decision.

Although Chicken With Plums, published in France three years earlier, is not erected on the monumental scale of Satrapi’s Persepolis and Persepolis 2, it finds the artist on moodier, more ruminative territory. The familiar echoes of her previous works — layered vignettes from past and future, conversational exchanges with ancestral spirits and holy deities, disclosures through oral history — are all resplendently present. But this time, so too is a fluid, pervasive sense of melancholy and contemplation that, despite the mischievous twitches of humor and jumpy frame-to-frame action entailed in the graphic novel form, Satrapi successfully captures with fuller panels, solitary close ups, and an introspective stream-of-consciousness pacing.

For a story about the stunted capacity for enjoyment, Satrapi liberally partakes in the pleasure as storyteller through her funny, poignant drawings on every page. In spite of the sober subject matter, the end effect is just as delicious as the depiction of Nasser’s favorite dish, chicken with plums, which appears to him (and to the reader) in a vision that’s grandiose, wistfully allegorical, and barely within reach.

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ABOUT THIS BOOK
Chicken with Plums
By Marjane Satrapi
96 pages
$16.95