Book Review: Embroideries

Marjane Satrapi has done it again! I have no idea how she can keep using the same family characters over and over again and yet they never get boring and they always seem to have more to give to the reader. Unlike her other memoirs, Embroideries focuses entirely on the women in her family.

The "story" begins with an explanation on how Iranian tea is made and its ability to bring people together in order to talk and share experiences. It is the sharing of these women's experiences that drives this book. Satrapi's mother, grandmother, cousins, aunts, and various other relatives discuss losing their virginity, the hazards of marriage, and the pleasures of being a mistress. Some women even discuss the liberation and sexual freedom that is felt from divorceThough little is told about each character's life, outside of her sexual experiences, it gives more than a glimpse into the sex lives of women in Tehran. Many of the women have had similar sexual histories, but each has her own interpretation and tells it with her own specific flair.

Though the subject matter is obviously sexual, Satrapi is able to discuss these issues without using any profanity or excessively crude language. Despite the fact that sex is the focus of the graphic novel, it is actually about sexuality in general and how is changes throughout a woman's life.

Unlike many other graphic novels, this story is not told in boxes of strips. Instead, it is drawn more like a sketch of a conversation in which there are drawings of many people on one page with speech bubbles going back and forth without being confined to a box. I previously referred to it as a "story" because there is no driving plot and really not much action at all. As shown through the artwork, the driving force of the novel is a conversation or discussion about sexaulity. Therefore, there is no need to have an explicit beginning, middle of end. Instead, each character's story merges into another to make a cacophony of voices.

I found this to be one of Satrapi's greatest works. Readers of hers will remember the characters from her other works, but they appear to be completely different in this book. Though they are not out of character, the reader certainly gets a different view that is not seen in any of her previous works. It is refreshing, interestings, enlightening, enjoyable, and most of all very endearing.

-DLP