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arjane Satrapi is an Iranian comic-book artist living in Paris. She is also, it turns out, an advocate for heavy smoking and a devoted admirer of Sophia Loren's boobs. Her previous books include Persepolis, a memoir of her teenage European exile following the Islamic Revolution, and Embroideries, in which her female relatives drink tea and dish on sex. Her latest, Chicken With Plums is set in 1958 Tehran and mines similar semi-autobiographical territory, with its main character, Nasser Ali Khan, loosely based on her mother's real-life uncle, a famous musician.
    Nasser Ali is a morose man of aristocratic tastes and lofty artistic ideals who feels that his life has been a failure. When his favorite tar (an Iranian string instrument) breaks, he searches for a replacement, only to find that all other tars sound flat to him. Sinking into depression, he decides to die — and takes to his bed to wait for death to arrive. The book traces the last eight days of his life as he ruminates on his unhappy marriage and a stillborn romance from his youth. No longer able to enjoy sensual pleasures, Nasser Ali wiles away his days chatting with the angel of death and fantasizing about sex with a certain pinup girl.
    Chicken With Plums is a darkly humorous book that, unlike Nasser Ali, doesn't take itself too seriously. It's filled with the same blocky black-and-white pictures as Persepolis, while the narrative style seems borrowed in equal parts from Hitchcock and Mrs. Dalloway. Satrapi spoke to Hooksexup about life's little pleasures, and how enjoying them would solve more problems than we can imagine. — Sarah Sundberg

Chicken With Plums feels like a book about missed opportunities. Part of the premise is that there has been a halfway sexual revolution. Nasser Ali meets a woman, Irane, but isn't allowed to marry her. There's also been an aborted political revolution. It's sort of a time of dashed hope.
Absolutely. The story is set in Iran in the '50s. Mossadegh has been overthrown. In some sense that was the end of democracy in the whole region, and the dream of a whole part of the world was broken. Nasser Ali's dream has been broken too. The story with this woman Irane is that she's not veiled anymore because the veil was banned by Reza Shah. It was the beginning of a sexual revolution that never actually took place.

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Nasser Ali is a portrait of a man who feels he has the prerogative to be deeply egotistical.
For me it was very much a description of the artist. I think that you have to be really egocentric and narcissistic to become an artist, and I say that as an artist. I consider myself to be a charming person, but I know that I am unbearable.

Nasser Ali is concerned with artistic ideals, but he's also pretty cynical when it comes to more religious forms of spirituality.
I have to tell you something: I never felt as free as when I wrote Chicken with Plums. When I write about women, and obviously when I write about myself like in Persepolis, people relate [the text] to me. In this book, the main character in is a man. I could hide behind him, yet in some ways, he is me. I can be very cynical, but I can also die of love.

Making a first-person protagonist a different gender than yourself seems to be one of the best devices to hide behind in fiction.
Absolutely. When Flaubert wrote Madame Bovary, he said, "Madame Bovary is me," and it was so true. Even with all her pathetic sides, all the things that she wants to be and will never be, I could completely relate to her. I don't believe in women's literature and men's literature. I think Marguerite Duras was right: literature doesn't have a sex. You shouldn't need to be a woman to write about a woman or a man to write about a man. If that were true, it would be the end of literature.

Though for some reason, women more often seem to feel that they have to write about women than men feel that they have to write about men.

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I know, but I am not one of those women. Some women — whatever is nasty they say is masculine, and whatever is nice they say is feminine. I don't believe that people are good or bad because of their gender. I've seen r eally horrible women, and I've seen horrible men, and I've seen really nice women and really nice men. I think it is a question of being a human being more than having a pair of boobs or a pair of balls.

Speaking of boobs, talk to me about Sophia Loren's. They play an important role in this story. How did they make their way into the book?
To me, Sophia Loren is the most beautiful woman in the whole world. She looks incredible. I mean, nothing on her is normal. She has this nose that isn't normal, a mouth that isn't normal, eyes that aren't normal. Her breasts are so big that you can't even imagine. I have a feeling that if God made me in two seconds, he spent two years on Sophia Loren. For me, she is the symbol of beauty and pleasure. Today in Hollywood you have to look like a stick, not really like a woman at all. Sophia Loren is a real woman, and this is the kind of woman I like. Actually, we had someone in our family who would say, "Give me some Sophia Loren, give the plums," every time we made chicken with plums.

You have these great, sensual descriptions of cigarette smoke in the book. One character calls cigarettes "food for the soul."

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Cigarettes are food for the soul. When you're smoking you can actually watch yourself breathing, watch your soul getting out of your body and into your body. Two days ago I spoke in Barnes & Noble in Chelsea. I said that I wrote this book to rehabilitate smoking, and people just stopped laughing. People are willing to eat any bullshit and drink bad water; pollution doesn't bother them. But as soon as you take out a cigarette they act as if you're going to kill them. This is not true! All the shit that they put in the food, all these hormones and pesticides and what have you, the stress, the condition of life, all of that . . . Living kills you anyway.

What made you want to write this book now?
I love love-stories in general. I also love the idea of death, because I think that it is such a scandal that we have to die. We die for the same reason that a worm will die, or a cat will die, but with the difference that we are conscious of it. But the book is also about pleasure, from Sophia Loren, to smoke, to love — all of that. We are living in a world in which the notion of pleasure is completely rejected. As soon as you say smoke, they say cancer. You say eating, they say cholesterol. You say making love, they say AIDS. But before AIDS and cancer and cholesterol you had the pleasure of doing these things. I think this rejection of pleasure is the basis of much of the fanaticism we see now. People are frustrated from lack of pleasure. If they had pleasure, why would they go and kill other people? They wouldn't.

Do you think there is a connection between American Puritanism and the kind of fanaticism that exists in other parts of the world?
Of course. You have all these states here that have this problem with sex. They won't teach it in school, sex shops are forbidden and they have weapon shops instead. Everybody knows that the weapon is just a continuation of the penis. The penis works very well on its own. You don't need any weapons, actually. All of that is based on frustration. All religion is based on frustration. It's a great way to control people. People who have fun have a bigger spirit, a bigger mind, and they are much less easily ruled than people who are so frustrated that they have to follow an ideology to be able to survive.  n°

To buy Chicken with Plums, click here.

©2006 hooksexup.com and Sarah Sundberg.