Reading Lolita in Tehran : A Memoir in Books by
AZAR NAFISI
"In the fall of 1995, after resigning from my last academic post, I decided to indulge myself and fulfill a dream..." (more) SIPs:
blind censor, black chador
Amazon.com 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
From Publishers Weekly This book transcends categorization as memoir, literary criticism or social history, though it is superb as all three. Literature professor Nafisi returned to her native Iran after a long education abroad, remained there for some 18 years, and left in 1997 for the United States, where she now teaches at Johns Hopkins. Woven through her story are the books she has taught along the way, among them works by Nabokov, Fitzgerald, James and Austen. She casts each author in a new light, showing, for instance, how to interpret The Great Gatsby against the turbulence of the Iranian revolution and how her students see Daisy Miller as Iraqi bombs fall on Tehran Daisy is evil and deserves to die, one student blurts out. Lolita becomes a brilliant metaphor for life in the Islamic republic. The desperate truth of Lolita's story is... the confiscation of one individual's life by another, Nafisi writes. The parallel to women's lives is clear: we had become the figment of someone else's dreams. A stern ayatollah, a self-proclaimed philosopher-king, had come to rule our land.... And he now wanted to re-create us. Nafisi's Iran, with its omnipresent slogans, morality squads and one central character struggling to stay sane, recalls literary totalitarian worlds from George Orwell's 1984 to Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. Nafisi has produced an original work on the relationship between life and literature. Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Reading the reviews and the dust jacket, you can get the idea that this is a book about a book club. For this reader, it is more directly about the impact of the Islamic revolution on the lives of educated women in Iran. There women are required at the risk of their lives to wear the "veil," which symbolizes the surrender of their independence to a government that uses fear and intimidation to control them and, in the words of the author, make them "irrelevant."
The author, now living in the US, tells of almost two decades in Iran, as a teacher of English and American literature. She tells of the great hopes for reform after the fall of the Shah and the return from exile of the Ayatollah Khomeini, and with her we watch in horror as the revolution takes Iran by force instead into its medieval past. There are arrests, murders, and executions and those who can, flee to the West. The transformation of Iran is charted by the repressive attempts to make women invisible, by covering them in public from head to toe. It becomes a world in which wearing fingernail polish, even under gloves, is a punishable offense. And punishment, as we learn, is typically brutal.
The author escapes from this violence into the imaginative world of Western novels (from Nabokov to Dashiell Hammet) where she finds democratic ideals expressed in fiction's ability to help us empathize with other people. For her, it is the heart that has gone out of the gun-wielding moral police that want to sweep away all but complete submission to their fundamentalist form of Islam. And while she is a teacher, she must deal with classes filled with students who have been polarized by the political forces around them. All, curiously, are in single agreement that the West is corrupt and absolutely evil. Meanwhile, the novels of Western writers engage them, sometimes furiously. A wonderful sequence in the book concerns a mock trial in the classroom in which "The Great Gatsby" is brought up on charges of immorality.
"Lolita," we discover, becomes a story of a girl who finally escapes from the clutches of a man who wants to erase who she is and turn her into a figment of his imagination. It's not an allegory of Iran, Nafisi insists, but it's hard not to see the parallels. The contamination of personal relationships between men and women and its impact on love and marriage inform their readings of James and Austen. Meanwhile, even as her classes meet to argue the merits of these authors, their books are disappearing as one bookstore after another is closed down.
Added to all this is an account of living through eight years of war with Iraq, while missiles fall on Tehran and the numbers of casualties on the front lines mount. After leaving teaching, the author assembles a hand-picked group of former students, all female, to meet weekly at her home and talk more about books. Here the individual personalities and histories of each come to the fore, and we get a glimpse (as in fiction) into personal worlds experienced intensely under circumstances that have nearly robbed them of their identities.
It's easy to go on and on about this book. There is so much packed into it. Needless to say, I recommend it highly, especially to anyone who loves books or has taught literature. Obviously, it also informs many gender issues. For male readers, such as myself, it is like an extended version of Virginia Woolf's illuminating "A Room of One's Own." The author and her young students show how the lives of both men and women are impoverished in a world where one sex attempts to assume control over the other. For me, the book is best summed up in the author's words near the end: "Living in the Islamic Republic is like having sex with a man you loathe."
The books is not a polemic, and as the author would be first to admit, there are many other voices to be heard on the subject of Iran, its government, and its role in the world. For this reader, her book opens a door into a complex subject that invites one to read more and know more.
Azar Nafisi was interviewed recently on PBS radio and her "live" voice is as rich and warm as her written voice in READING LOLITA IN TEHRAN. How remarkable that one who was so put upon by the ruthless regime that seized power in Iran around 1980 and continues today could write such a wonderful and compelling story. Ms Nafisi says she thanks the "Revolution" because without it she might not have fully realized how wonderful freedom is. She left Iran in 1997 to return to the US where she had obtained her education. At this time-according to the radio interview and book jacket--she teaches English literature at Johns Hopkins University.
Before I read Ms. Nafisi's book, I had a very negative view of Nabokov's `Lolita' which has been translated into at least two films, one starring James Mason and the other more recent version starring Jeffrey Irons. The latter film version was not distributed to theaters in the US owing to an outcry from the US public about the content which included incest. I have to admit I was against showing of the Irons film in the US, but since I know nothing about the interpretation in the Irons film my thinking could biased. Whatever the case for Irons' film, Ms. Nafisi has exonerated Nabokov as far as I am concerned. Apparently, he was on Lola's side and trying to show the reader how really awful Humbert the stepfather was. Humbert blamed Lola (whom he called Lolita) for her own rape. I may finally read 'Lolita' or I may not, but I have a different perspective. Ms. Nafisi has written a book about Nabokov's novels that I plan to read since I am now convinced I not have given this author a fair hearing.
Ms Nafisi's memoir works on several levels. On one level, her book is literary criticism. Through her exchange with her students, she reviews selected works by several classic authors including: Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Jane Austen. On a second level she narrates the tale of a group of female students who continued their studies in English literary criticism at Ms. Nafisi's apartment after she resigned from her teaching position. (She resigned because the intrusion of the `Revolution' into her affairs and the affairs of the institutions where she worked.) On a third level, Ms Nafisi is reveals how a civilized nation slipped into madness as the result of a `religious' movement. On the highest level, this book challenges the reader to ask, "What is morality?"
I found myself laughing and crying as I read Ms. Nafisi's beautifully written book. She has an important story to tell, and I hope every person (especially women) in America will read this very entertaining and informative work. I sent a copy to my sister who is a high school librarian with the suggestion she encourage seniors to read the book. In my opinion it ranks with Victor Frankel's, `Man's Search for Meaning.' You can think of it as `woman's search for meaning'. Nafisi implies there is no difference between Nazis Frankel faced and the "religious" zealots she faced.
The book is unique in that it is a memoir and a commentary on literary works. It is about the writer's life in Tehran, during the eighties and the nineties and interspersed in her memoir are her comments on western literature and authors such as Nabokov, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James and Jane Austen. I believe the writer was trying to let the reader see a link between fiction and reality.
The first few pages led me to believe that the book was going to be about the members of the secret book discussion group which met at the writer's house for two years. The theme of the writer's English literature classes was the relation between fiction and reality.
I was fascinated by the writer's experiences: teaching western literature during a time when anything western was labeled indecent and decadent, surviving the eight year war between Iraq and Iran and deciding to migrate to United States. The book opened my eyes about the strength and courage of Middle Eastern women and in particular, Iranian women.
Nafisi painted a picture of religion being used as an instrument of power that intruded in the personal lives of Iranians after the departure of the Shah. There was an example of some young ladies being reprimanded for eating apples too seductively. She painted a clear picture of chaos in education at the university level where leftists and Islamists frequently clashed on campus reflecting the drama and chaos in the Iranian society where the leftists, Islamists and Monarchists battled each other.
Ultimately, this is a well-written and wonderful book. Not only is it about survival of the human spirit, it's a book that celebrate many passions, reading among them. Pick up a copy! Another very different, but highly enjoyable recent Amazon purchase I enjoyed was The Losers Club: Complete Restored Edition by Richard Perez.
The ingredients I usually love were all there: a memoir + a focus on women + a discussion of books + insights into a fascinating country. Unfortunately, they failed to add up. Neither the diatribes on the authors nor the personal anecdotes were interesting. This has been done much better by much more skilled authors. Try "Honeymoon in Purdah", "To See and See Again" or "Nine Parts of Desire" for far more interesting, enjoyable books on Iran and Muslim women.
I have to passion to go for any book that has an unusual but interesting setting. Reading Lolita in Tehran proved to be one of such books. I wasn't disappointed when I read it to the last page. Dwelling in an atmosphere of tyranny which breeds fear, the book talks of dissent in a new political system that was against openness in arts, culture, history and dissent. In the Iran of her times, even western literature was considered anti-revolutionary by the authorities, yet people stayed determined to pay any price to be connected to the rest of the world. War and peace still left the society yearning for freedom, a craving to be free that led to the author's decision to eventually leave Iran with her family to the United States of America.It reminded me of Janvier Tisi's stories and similar situations where a system that strives on deprivation eventually forces its best brains out.
This book provided fascinating insights into life in revolutionary Iran. It is NOT necessary to read Lolita to enjoy it. Not wishing to spend a lot of time repeating what other reviewers said, two items in the book were most interesting for me. The first was the incident of the young man who is confronted with his inability to bury his grandmother because she was of the Baha'i Faith and all the Baha'i cemeteries have been bulldozed. The second was the insight into those who wore the veil BEFORE the revolution and how the enforced dress code for all makes them feel.
The book has great value to thinking people today not only to teach us about the oppression which still continues in Iran but also to give us insights into the thoughts of ordinary thinking Moslems.
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Sex with a man you loathe. . ., July 21, 2003
Very disappointing, May 27, 2005