Graphic Reads

In Chicken with Plums, Marjane Satrapi examines the life of her great-uncle, the renowned Iranian tar player Nasser Ali Khan. Written in her standard straightforward narrative voice and illustrated with her trademark black and white drawings, Satrapi explores the final week of Nasser Ali's passionate and troubled life.

After his wife breaks his beloved tar, Nasser Ali takes to his bed determined to die. He abandons the needs of his wife and four children and retires to his room to brood on his past and mourn his loss. Satrapi chronicles his last days and fleshes out the story with flashbacks to Nasser Ali's youth as well as projections into his family's future without him. As the narrative progresses, the reader comes to sympathize with Nasser Ali and his strange choice to give up on life.

Like so many of Satrapi's work, Chicken with Plums is a short and simple read that on the surface appears to be only the sad chronicle of a musician's last days. However, this graphic novel is also a reflection on the ways in which love and loss, choices and fate, can direct - or destroy - a life.