Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books
Item Description
An inspired blend of memoir and literary criticism, Reading Lolita in Tehran is a moving testament to the power of art and its ability to change and improve people's lives. In 1995, after resigning from her job as a professor at a university in Tehran due to repressive policies, Azar Nafisi invited seven of her best female students to attend a weekly study of great Western literature in her home. Since the books they read were officially banned by the government, the women were forced to meet in secret, often sharing photocopied pages of the illegal novels. For two years they met to talk, share, and "shed their mandatory veils and robes and burst into color." Though most of the women were shy and intimidated at first, they soon became emboldened by the forum and used the meetings as a springboard for debating the social, cultural, and political realities of living under strict Islamic rule. They discussed their harassment at the hands of "morality guards," the daily indignities of living under the Ayatollah Khomeini's regime, the effects of the Iran-Iraq war in the 1980s, love, marriage, and life in general, giving readers a rare inside look at revolutionary Iran. The books were always the primary focus, however, and they became "essential to our lives: they were not a luxury but a necessity," she writes.
Threaded into the memoir are trenchant discussions of the work of Vladimir Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Jane Austen, and other authors who provided the women with examples of those who successfully asserted their autonomy despite great odds. The great works encouraged them to strike out against authoritarianism and repression in their own ways, both large and small: "There, in that living room, we rediscovered that we were also living, breathing human beings; and no matter how repressive the state became, no matter how intimidated and frightened we were, like Lolita we tried to escape and to create our own little pockets of freedom," she writes. In short, the art helped them to survive. --Shawn Carkonen
Product Details
- Author: Azar Nafisi
- Publication Date: 2003-12-30
- Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
- Product Group: Book
- Manufacturer: Random House Trade Paperbacks
- Binding: Paperback, 384 pages
- Package Dimensions:
- Dimensions: 780L x 510W x 90H
- Weight: 75
- List Price: $15.00
- ISBN: 081297106X
- ASIN: 081297106X
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Customer Reviews
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Reading Lolita In Tehran
2010-02-11
Reviewer: Benn Bell
Reading Lolita in Tehran is both a profile in courage and a literary lecture all in one telling us how art can change lives and sustain us as humans. A Nietzsche once said, "We have to have art in order not to die of the truth." In Tehran, unfortunately, people are dying because of the truth.
Azar Nafisi skillfully interweaves her lectures on Nabokov, Fitzgerald, and James with her interaction with a group of young Iranian women who she calls her girls as they join her in a secret class to study Lolita and other important works of fiction. We get to know each of the young women individually who represent a cross section of Iranian society, religion and politics, as the book progresses. We are also privy to the treacherous landscape Nafisi and her students had to navigate during those troubled times before Nafisi left Iran for good in 1997. As she says in her book, she left Iran but Iran did not leave her.
The classes' favorite book, fittingly, was Nabokov's, Invitation to a Beheading. This is the story of Cincinnatus C. who has been interred and condemned to death for committing the sin of "gnostical turpitude", or, in other words, being different. This is a crime punishable by beheading. In this novel, the villains are the totalitarian rulers trying to posses and control imaginative minds. In Lolita, the villain is Humbert Humbert. He is the one with the imaginative mind. Lolita is also a metaphor for Iran who is victimized by the Islamic oppressor and who control the action of females by placing them under the veil and exploiting their nubile young bodies by lowering the marriage age to nine. This is an age of innocence that would make Humbert himself blush with shame.
How many years can some people exist before they allowed to be free?
2010-01-20
Reviewer: Gary Selikow
More than a combination of literary criticism and memoirs of living through the totalitarian ruthlessness of Islamist-ruled Iran, this book essentially examines how the author and a group of friends took refuge in literature from the totalitarian nightmare.
And at the same time using that literature to make sense of life under Islamo-Nazi repression.
The women in the group are able to make analogies of the works of Vladimir Nabokov, Jane Austen, Henry James and F Scott Fitzgerald with the society in which they live.
The villain of Nabokov's Lolita, Humbert, rapes a twelve year old girl and thus the book is about the confiscation of one individuals life by another.
Humbert has tried to shape another soul according to his own hopes and dreams.
So the author is taking revenge on the Ayatollah and the Mullahs for confiscating the lives of the people of Iran, for their war against women.
This is a society in which girls are punished most brutally for wearing coloured shoe laces, running in the school yard or licking ice cream in public. Where women are flogged for wearing nail polish.
Marxist and left wing feminists in the West pour scorn on taking up the cause of oppressed women in Iran, as the Iranian Marxists did at the beginning of the Islamic Revolution of 1979, before they themselves became victims.
"They claimed that there were bigger fish to fry' the author explains "That the imperialists and their lackeys need to be dealt with first. Focusing on women's rights was individualistic and bourgeois and played into their hands"
"What imperialists?" asks the author acting as a much needed voice of true conscience 'Do you mean those battered and bruised faces on television confessing to their crimes? Do you mean the prostitutes they recently stoned to death, or my former school principal Mrs Parsa, who like the prostitutes was accused of "corruption on earth", "sexual offences", and "violation of decency and morality" for having been the minister of education. For which offenses was she put in a sack and then shot or stoned to death. Are those the lackeys you are talking about, and is it in order to wipe these people out that we have to not protest?"
Azar Nafisi has been indeed accused by leftist and Islamist radicals in the West of serving the 'imperialist' or 'neoconservative' cause by writing this novel.
So once again the dreams of the people of Iran to enjoy the same freedom , Nafisi's leftwing critics in the West enjoy are denied.
Like Humbert in Lolita, the Western Left want to confiscate the lives of the long-suffering people of Iran and shape them according to the formers own hopes and dreams.
Like Humbert and like all great myth makers they try to fashion reality of their dream and end up destroying reality and their dream?
Nafisi is a true feminist who really cares about the rights and welfare of women unlike so many left wing self-styled feminists in the West, who want people moulded according to their ideals, and have never spoken up for the persecution of women by Islamists, for their own selfish reasons.
Memories Of A Rebellious Academic In Iran
2009-10-10
Reviewer: Chris Luallen
In the first chapter Nafisi describes, in great detail, the literary club she formed with 7 of her best university students. So I expected the book to focus on the young women and their reactions to great works of Western literature such as "Lolita" and "The Great Gatsby". But instead the book turned out to be mostly about Nafisi herself and her life, in the 80's and 90's, under Iran's tyrannical regime.
I prefer clear, direct writing. So at first I was put off by Nafisi's overly descriptive style. But the circumstances that she was living under were so compelling that she managed to draw me in to her story after all. The picture that emerges of post-revolutionary Iran is a sharply divided society where a corrupt band of religious fanatics have essentially made life hell for everyone else. Of course, I already knew this about Iran before reading the book. But Nafisi brings these shady images into the light with her stories of people forced to live a lie or else pay the consequences.
Intelligent, perceptive and informative
2009-10-09
Reviewer: Sallie K.
This was a very sensitive and intelligent portrayal of life under a repressive regime and how the author struggled to express herself and teach others through her knowledge and interpretations of great literature.
Reading Lolita in Tehran
2009-10-07
Reviewer: Julianna Ramsey
I can't say I didn't enjoy it. I did. It was interesting to learn about how women are living in Tehran and their many challenges. But I feel it went on too long with too much detail. For me it ran out of steam toward the end.
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