Chicken with Plums by Marjane Satrapi
Until very recently, I was not aware that Marjane Satrapi had a new book out. Once I was, I went to Borders and bought it.
Chicken with Plums, like Persepolis and Embroideries, is about the Satrapi family--in this case, Lord Nasser Ali Satrapi, apparently a brother of the grandmother familiar to readers of Persepolis and Embroideries--the name 'satrapi' is a very ancient one associated with the Achaemenid nobility and has the privilege of descending through both the male and female lines. Nasser Ali Khan played the tar, a type of Iranian lute, and the story begins when his tar is broken.
Chicken with Plums is very unlike Persepolis in that, while Persepolis is a sweeping story involving political, religious, familial, and societal issues, Chicken with Plums is focusses on eight days in one man's life (and, at the end, death--this isn't a spoiler, it's on the book jacket). The titular food is used as a symbol for the joy that Nasser Ali Khan gets from life, and its only actual appearance in the book quickly devolves into an erotic fantasy. The book is a surreal, disjointed real-life fairy tale that shuttles backwards and forwards in space and time and yet is possessed of its own internal coherence and sense of inevitability. 1998 is pressed up against the time of King Solomon, not because that makes any sense, but just because that's how the story goes. A glimpse into the future life of one of Nasser Ali's sons, Mozaffar Satrapi, makes a silent, full-page frame late in the book all the more poignant, meaningful, and heartbreaking.
This is not a book for squeamish or faint-hearted people. It details the misery of a man's life in the week before his death and follows his thoughts faithfully no matter what they are about. It is impossible to determine how reliable a narrator Nasser Ali is because Marjane extrapolated the entire book from his life history up until that point rather than relying on anything the man actually said or wrote. This is understandable, since Nasser Ali Satrapi Khan died eleven years before Marjane Satrapi was born.
However, if you can get past the despair and confusion inherent in the concept, Chicken with Plums is well worth reading for insights into, as Eliot wrote, 'the stages of his age and youth, entering the whirlpool.'